
h ;>V',r:;. 

l 




'^;V ■ ■ I 

■ 



■ 









■ :::■■:: v::«» 
I "./*!•« ■ 



■ 



^H 






■ \ZK. 






■ m 









,)'r 



V 



■ 









** 














% 










^ ^ 








Kp 









































*- 






Augusts COMTE anil the Middle Agss. 



HUNTED BY < xk .. nx,,,,kmnv,k ,, 



Auguste COMTE 

i 
AND 

THE MIDDLE AGES 

A LECTURE 

GIVEN BEFORE A PRIVATE CIRCLE 

IN THE 

CITY OF POZSONY 

(PRESBOURG) 

ON SATURDAY 24 GUTTEMBERG 97 

(5 SEPTEMBER 1885) 

HENRY EDGER, 

Naturalized Citizen (English-born) of the United States of America. 

Fais ce que dois advienne que pourra. 



POZSONY : 

PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHED 

BY ALL BOOKSELLERS. 

AGENT FOR THE UNITED STATES: Dr. P. J. POPOFF, 

1948 ATLANTIC AVENUE, BROOKLYN, NEW-YORK. 

JiJU. ra.g-33.-ts reserved. 




A 



*Y 



*v 



<H / 



Augusts COMTG and the Middle %s. 



In undertaking, a year ago to-day, for the 
second time, to give a lecture more or less public 
in this City of Presbourg on the anniversary of 
3 death of Auguste Comte ; the lecture being 
an exposition of a certain phase of the colossal 
work accomplished by this great Genius, I felt 
it necessary to say a few words in explanation 
of the attitude I presume to take in these Annual 
Lectures. And if I feel it necessary to do the 
same again to-day I may congratulate myself 
that it is for the last time. I am hoping 
to have ready for the press in the course of this 
next year a short statement of the general 
character of the Religion I profess that will 
render unnecessary similar explanations on any 
subsequent recurrence of this anniversary. 

These Lectures, in fact, in no wise constitute 
any religious propagande. In them I make no 



Z? 



pretention to do any thing more than offer to 
the intelligent curiosity of the cultivated classes 
of this city accurate information on a subject 
with which I happen to be familiar, but which, 
while very little known among the public. 
beginning to attract the attention of the Thinking 
World all through Europe. (The necessity for 
any such explanation, however, exists no doubt 
only in my own feelings. Neither the Govern- 
ment of the Country, nor the Clergy, nor the 
Press, nor even the population or Authorit 
of the City, can for a moment be imagined to 
see any ground for concern, or an 
any sort of notice, in an occurrence of 
insignificant a char the giving of a 

lecture in a private room. an audit : 

convened by personal invitation, and compo 
only of a handful of persons from among the 
very exceptional part of the population thai 
acquainted with the English language. But any 
thing- resembling, prima 

versy is so far from being a benefit to 
population that it would seem to me a very 
ungracious act, on the part o\ a foreigner, t«> d»» 
any tiling to bring it about. Not that the noble 
habits ot toleration which have tor centuri 



characterized so admirably the very sympathetic 
people of this Country — sympathetic both in the 
English and the French senses of the word — 
are in the least likely to be at any time found 
wanting. But it would be an ungrateful return 
for the generous hospitality a stranger coming 
hither is sure to experience, to put those noble 
habits to the test by doing anything that could 
resemble the introduction of the poisonous apple 
of religious discord. 

The doctrines of the wonderful Genius who 
bore the name of Auguste COMTE, and who 
like all geniuses of the very first order, was 
naturally and inevitably misunderstood altogether 
by his cotemporaries. especially in his own 
country, do in fact ultimately result in religion, 
in a Religious Dogma, that religious dogma being 
nothing either more or less than the Synthesis of 
Positive Science regarded as a one whole. On 
the basis of this dogma will inevitably arise, 
sooner or later, a Religion, complete in every 
thing that practically constitutes religion: Wor- 
ship, Consecration, moral and intellectual In- 
struction, Culture and Discipline, social and in- 
dividual Direction and Regulation, Consolation, 
calming and fortifying under affliction and the 



— 4 — 

inevitable injustice actually characterizing terres- 
trial existence, with the Prophecy of a Better 
Future. It would seem, therefore, at first sight, 
as though lectures expository of the doctrines 
of Comte, given, too, by one who is him- 
self an ardent disciple, must necessarily constitute 
a religious propagande, a propagande tending 
to introduce a new religion, and with it just 
that apple of discord alluded to. For certainly 
no controversies in which men engage are more 
apt to be bitter and envenomed than those be- 
tween rival religious creeds; and nothing can 
be more undesirable for any country, especially 
one that is in actual enjoyment of religious po, 
and tranquillity, than to have a war of rival 
dogmas set up in its midst. But those who have 
some little acquaintance with Positive Sciem 
even in its lower grades only, mathematical, 
physical or chemical, will understand, almost at 
the first glance, even if it could be imagined 
possible that real religion should ever be based 
upon a dogma purely scientific, how utterly im- 
possible it must be for a doctrine that is really 
so, one that is purely scientific, to introduce 
any such Avar of rival dogmas. For genuinely 
positive science never has to spread itself and 



extend its constantly growing empire over the 
human mind by popular discussion. Such dis- 
cussion; indeed, is utterly contrary to its miture. 
In proportion as reall3 r positive science is, in 
fact ; spread among* the people ; the consciousness 
of the radical incompetency of popular discussion 
in the solution of serious questions is spread at 
the same time; its incompetency; at all events, 
in the solution of questions in which the inter- 
vention of positive science is even conceivably 
possible. Positive Science trusts for her propa- 
gande solely and exclusively to -Experience 
and serious Instruction; that is just why her 
empire does in fact constantly go on growing 
irresistibly. The inevitable result of the dissem- 
ination of the Positive Doctrine is ; therefore; 
exactly the opposite of that so justly to be de- 
precated. Instead of tending to agitation it tends 
irresistibly; wherever it is introduced; in exact 
proportion to its extension; to social calm. It 
tends irresistibly to bring into the most profound 
discredit the whole of the pestilential business 
of the political; social or religious agitator. 

That which specially imposes on the Lec- 
turer the duty of the present explanation is the 
fact that; in completely private life ; in the cases 



— 6 — 

wherein he has had the pleasure of making the 
personal acquaintance of individuals among the 
population of this city, he has been unable, as 
must naturally be the case with any one possessed 
of deep and fervent convictions, which have 
proved the source of profoundest consolation, 
hope and energy to himself, to avoid making 
efforts to share with his acquaintances the hap- 
piness he himself enjoys. Perhaps it were not 
an unfounded boast to confess that his efforts 
in this sphere have not been wholly without 
success. But the Positive Religion of Humanity, 
arising on the dogmatic foundation of the Scien- 
tific Synthesis, imposes upon its adherents, not 
only the duty of living for others, but also and 
equally that of living in open day. Representing 
Human Life as attaining its just dignity only 
when the Individual freely and voluntarily con- 
secrates his existence to the social service, it 
insists upon the absence of all concealment 
the only sufficient guarantee of the sincerity 
and reality of the social consecration. All secret 
intrigue, all underhand contrivance \ thing 

that ever so little savors of plotting, it calls 
upon its disciples to utterly eschew, even to 
abhor; it insists upon their doing all that ti 



— 7 — 

do openly and above board ; upon their doing 
nothing, therefore, that is not fully avowable ; 
and upon their fully taking upon themselves 
the just and proper responsibility of their con- 
duct, be it what it may. Its real adherents can 
never, therefore, join any secret society, however 
honorable and avow r able the objects of such a 
Society may be. The condition of secrecy 
in itself creates a certain presumption of ends 
and aims to say the least selfish, with a collect- 
ive if not absolutely individual selfishness, even 
where not directly anti-social; and, speaking 
among ourselves, or in addressing disciples, we 
use upon this point much stronger language. 

But the same Religion teaches its adherents 
also a just respect for the actually existing 
public opinion, as well as the actually existing- 
social institutions, even in regard to points on 
which opinion or institutions may be susceptible 
of rectification. And especially is this due from 
a Foreigner tow r ards the laws, the institutions, 
the customs, the manners and all the other social 
conditions of the country that gives him hospi- 
tality. Every thing in the teachings of Comte 
tends to deeply impress this consideration on 
the minds of his followers. Especially the repre- 



sentation made by those teachings of the urgent 
social importance at this day of cultivating the 
spirit of mutual respect and mutual friendliness 
between the different nationalities that compose 
our modern civilization. The beneficent conse- 
quences in all regards, moral and intellectual 
as well as social and political, of such a spirit 
and temper it w< tainly needless to dwell 

on, or for one moment to urge, for they will 
be spontaneously felt by every rightly con 
tuted mind; but their only reliable foundation 
can be in the existence of the saint- dispositions 
among the individuals comp ; tferent 

nationalities, where in fact they 
very remarkable and most en< 
already, the ancient sentiments of international 
hatred, jealousy and dislike being everywhl 
at this day confined to limited c of the 

populations, classes that have less undergo 
the reactions of the more wl 
the modern spirit.*) And the culture of such a 
mutual friendliness and respect between the 



The few seeming exceptions to this 
show how ready they arc to disappeai 
statesmanship shall arise to set aside tlu 
gratuitously placed in the way of the spontaneously d< 

international amity. 



populations themselves, irrespectively of the 
Governments, is the more important from the 
fact that the mutual amity friendliness and res- 
pect between the different peoples composing 
our modern occidental civilization, need on every 
ground to be combined with the political inde- 
pendence of the different nations, independence 
which, when once all danger of foreign aggression 
or internal disorder were fully and fairly laid 
aside, it would be an advantage to develope 
rather than to further restrict. 

The Lecturer cannot help feeling, therefore, 
that he owes to the public a certain general 
account of a doctrine that in his private and 
personal relations he cannot help propagating. 
He owes it moreover to the few who do in 
private listen to him to make this more public 
(although modest and unobtrusive) exposition, 
exposition that ought finally to receive the further 
publicity to be given by the press. In fulfilling 
this duty he is very desirous of avoiding every 
utterance that could wound the just susceptibil- 
ities of any single inhabitant of the city that 
gives him shelter and protection. The religion 
that animates his life makes its adherents feel 
that they have by no means discharged all their 



— 10 — 



duties towards the society, and indeed towards 
the country, in the bosom of which they live, 
when they have simply paid their rent and 
taxes and abstained from any breach of the 
civil law. Now the name of Auguste Comte is 
beginning to become known, throughout the 
Intellectual World of all Europe, to such a degree 
as to make an authentic account of the work 
of his life and of its culminating characteristics 
a presumable satisfaction of the curiosity, that 
will naturally have a certain prevalence in this 
as in any other city equally intelligent. The 
doctrines of Auguste Comte treat, however, of 
such subjects, that in giving any sort of account 
of them one is necessarily treading on delic; 
ground; and the Lecturer is desirous at the very 
outset of allaying apprehensions naturally the 
fore liable to be awakened by the very subjects, 
apprehensions, however, that are in reality 
groundless, or the Lecture would certainly not. 
be given. At the same time the subjects do give 
the greater importance to accurate information 
in regard to the doctrines of a Thinker evidently 
destined to be much more widely known than 
he ever was during his life-time, and one who 
very greatness and the yastness of the work 



he accomplished naturally cause to be in the 
highest degree misunderstood at the outset, 
wherever the fame of them may Anally reach. 
The distinctive characteristic of all the spe- 
culations of Comte consists in their fundamental 
assumption that all phenomena, social and moral 
phenomena as well as others, are subject to 
immutable natural law. This assumption does 
indeed implicitly underlie all distinctively modern 
thought, and is, too, precisely that characteristic 
of the actually prevailing opinion, acknowledged 
or unacknowledged, that is most constantly and 
most steadily gaining ground. All belief in the 
supernatural is more and more universally being 
set down systematically as superstition. It is not 
therefore the assumption itself that is so much 
the distinctive and decisive characteristic of the 
labors of Auguste Comte as its open recog- 
nition, and the frank and honest acceptance of 
all its necessary logical consequences. But the 
systematic acceptance and open recognition of 
this underlying principle, at once of Positive 
Science and of Modern Thought, viz, the uni- 
versal prevalence of immutable Natural Law, 
is just that which gives to science a tendency 
and an ultimate result the very opposite of that 



which might naturally be supposed, especially 
as regards its bearings upon religion, as from 
the very nature of our subject to day we shall 
forthwith have to very plainly see. It will al- 
ready be manifest, indeed, that if the hypothesis 
of the universal prevalence of natural law were 
to prove in conformity with fact, it would follow 
that a positive science of Sociology and a posi- 
tive science of Morals must necessarily exist, if 
not actually at least potentially.*) Now the Life- 
work of Comte consisted essentially in founding 
these two supreme grades of positive scien 
positive Sociology and positive Morals. This 
the same as to say that he actually discovered 
immutable natural laws at once of social exis- 
tence and of social development: and also immu- 
table natural laws to which our interior moral 
existence, at once intellectual and affective, is 
subject. But if this were really the Let, 

every one acquainted with the true force of 
these terms will see at once, that the fact would 
be of more tremendous importance than any 



*) Some speculators in this sphere, with materialistic ten- 
dencies and in view of materialistic ends, have proposed to 
employ the word Psychology as the name of the science which 
treats o( individual Human Nature, at the same time inverting 
its position relatively to sociology. 



— 13 — 

ever before accomplished on this planet. And 
an exposition of the doctrines of Comte neces 
sarily consists, therefore, of an exposition of so- 
ciological and moral science, of immutable natural 
laws of Human Existence and Human Develop- 
ment, social and individual; than which a more 
important subject; at all events, is inconceivable. 
Tt must be observed here, however, that in 
the process of its development, Positive Science, 
notwithstanding the undisputed Empire it finally 
acquires over the human mind, has necessarily 
to pass through a transitionary hypothetical stage, 
during which its doctrines have no more autho- 
rity or influence over the general public, ordi- 
narily indeed much less, than any other sort 
of doctrine. Only minds of the very rare order 
that is capable of comprehending, appreciating 
and verifying directly, the demonstrations on 
which it rests, are capable at the outset of 
undergoing its domination and of thus entering 
into the new Light. For every scientific Dis- 
covery, especially one of capital importance, is 
necessarily at first, even in the mind of the 
Discoverer himself, only a hypothesis, until he 
has subjected it to rigorous demonstrations, 
which are often of so difficult a nature that 



— i 4 — 

not a single contemporary can be found to ac- 
complish their verification. The great Kepler 
declared that he would be himself fully content 
if he could but be sure that at the end of half 
a century his works would have found one single 
evppreciative reader. The spiritual allegiance of 
the general public is always won over by a 
much simpler and easier, but more indirect, mode 
of verification, consisting in the fulfilment of 
itKe predictions of future occurrences made 
n the name of the corresponding 'science. In 
a word, the hypothetical stage of genuine science 
terminates for the general public only when the 
hypothesis has received the decisive stamp of 
Experience. So much is this the case that, when 
a new doctrine of any sort, professing to be 
based upon science, starts at once into a wide- 
popularity, popularity evidently based upon a 
predilection for the particular doctrines taught, 
that popularity itself furnishes a pretty strong 
presumption of a considerable element of char-' 
latanism in that doctrine. For the genuine n 
lities of our existence are by no means apt to 
be sufficiently flattering to our spontaneously 
predominant inclinations to secure an immediate 
welcome: the honest revelation of them is much 



— is — 

more often accepted only perforce, and after 
severe castigations at the hand of that unrelen- 
ting Disciplinarian. 

A second distinctive characteristic of the 
labors of Comte, of scarcely less importance 
than the first, save that without that first it 
would have remained eternally impossible, con- 
sists in the systematic and constant recognition 
of science as a one whole, a complete and uni- 
versal Doctrine, the discovery of positive Socio- 
logy and positive Moral Science having ren- 
dered the empire of science conterminous with 
the ultimate limits of Human Thought. Indeed 
the constitution of the Scientific Synthesis, the 
transformation of science into a one, consistent, 
fully hierarchical Whole, under the systematic 
supremacy of sociological and moral science, 
veritably sacred science, and the substitution of 
this Synthesis for Specialist science, a hetero- 
geneous assemblage of so-called sciences, sepa- 
T?".'l sciences, with no systematic link between 
them, no mutual responsibility, so to speak, is 
the achievement of supreme importance. It was 
by just this substitution that Auguste Comte 
changed entirely the relations between Science 
and Religion-, for specialist science, whatever the 






— 16 — 

intentions of the savans rv/to cultivate it, is neces- 
sarily materialistic and atheistic in its tenden- 
cies; while synthetic science is in all its bearings 
profoundly religious ; sociological and moral 
science combining to demonstrate that both from 
the social and the individual point of view, Re- 
ligion is beyond all comparison man's supreme 
concern, and that, too, independently of all im- 
aginable dogmatic differences, thus transporting 
all the influence of Science as a 'whole from 
the side of the modern religious indifference, 
and the materialism and practical atheism on 
which that indifference is basid, to the side of 
Religion and of Christianity, and therefore 
the side of the Churches so far as their purely 
spiritual action is concerned. 

Any one sufficiently acquainted; however, 
with Positive Science, even in its lower gra< 
or degrees only, mathematical, physical or che 
mical, will easily understand, and indeed spon-' 
taneously see for himself, how impossible it were, 
in a single lecture, adapted to a popular, even 
although specially intelligent audience, to give 
anything like a systematic exposition of either 
of these two new and supreme grades or degr< 
of Science, or even of one single phase oi either 



— 17 — 

of them, such as is indicated in the announcement 
of our subject for to-day. An exposition, adapted 
for instance to a scientific school, even of the 
Positive Theory of the Middle Ages only, would 
require various conditions in no wise realizable 
here to-day. All that is attempted is, to give a 
general conception of these two new sciences, 
as they will be called, and which, as being new, 
remain still, necessarily, in their purely hypo- 
thetical stage. To give a conception at once of 
the scientific synthesis as a whole, and especially 
of its iwo supreme degrees, sociological and 
and moral, sufficiently comprehensive and exact 
to enable an intelligent mind to judge, whether 
there be really here something* important enough 
to be worth the trouble of further and more 
laborious investigation. And above all, such as 
to enable the statesman and patriot to form an 
intelligent judgment on the important question, 
whether the general dissemination of a knowledge 
of these new and hypothetical sciences, and 
especially of the new and hypothetical synthesis 
of all science, would be an advantage and clear 
gain to a nation, or whether it were rather a 
thing* to be watched with suspicion. Dealing 
with questions so delicate, and of so supreme 



— 18 — 



importance; as the very foundations of religion 
and morality ; it can scarcely help being either 
the one or the other. 

I. 

From this point of view, the most important 
question is, no doubt, the bearing of the scien- 
tific synthesis, and of these its two supreme 
grades, upon Religion. Now the fundamental 
principle of positive science, universal underlying 
assumption of all distinctively modern thought, 
the subjection of all phenomena whatever to 
immutable natural law, seems at first sight not 
merely hostile but fatal to religion, as casting 
profound discredit upon the religious dogma 
based altogether upon supernaturalist conceptions. 
But the discredit exists already, inflicted upon 
the theological philosophy by positive science 
in general, discredit gradually growing for cen- 
turies past, and no doubt at this day being more 
intensified than ever, and by positive science 
too. But all this discredit, as actually existing, 
is necessarily due to specialist science exclu- 
sively. The Scientific Synthesis is altogether 
too new, too little known, so far as known too 
manifestly hypothetical as yet, to have had, up 



— 19 — 

to this day, any appreciable influence upon public 
opinion. Positive Science does tend no doubt ; 
positive science in every form ; and tend irresis- 
tibly, to make all belief in the supernatural be 
looked upon as superstition. And it does so, not 
by directly attacking theological dogmas, so much 
as by constantly furnishing a greater and greater 
number of purely natural explanations of pheno- 
mena formerly accounted for, as indeed was at 
first the case with all phenomena whatever, on 
the theological principle; thus giving rise to an 
irresistible suspicion, that all things have a natural 
explanation if one could but find it out. And 
this tendenc5^ ; again, is much strengthened by 
the contrast presented between the clearness, 
the precision, the consistency and the practical 
utility, as well as the certitude, inherent in scientific 
conceptions, and the vagueness, obscurity, doubt- 
fulness, and, above all at this day, the moral and 
practical impotence which characterize the theo- 
logical or supernatural. It is easy, moreover, to 
see that this tendency to treat the supernatural 
as always a mere superstition sheltering one's 
self in so doing under the aegis of science, exists 
in thousands upon thousands of souls that never 
give themselves the smallest trouble about philo- 



sophical speculation or scientific inv< ^n. 

that would think all those til 

and one insufferably tedioi . but can still 

very easily appreciate the convenience of be 
emancipated from an irk- 
The fundamental principle of the I* 
scientific Philosophy, th< died Law of the 

Three States, the di< of \vh: rtli 

to sociological science, sin | 
dency of modern opinion t and 

inevitable one, an i >m. 

the fundamental and immutable 1 
of the human mind. 
But, in Frankly 
irresistible, and then 
all its Logical consequences, tl 
thesis gets b< ind with 

utterly irresistible, It all supernaturalist i 
nations of phenomen; 

is simply by means of the substitut natural 

explanations. The phenomi 
remain unchanged, their reality in no wise dim- 
inished by any modifi sin our 
It' Christianity instance, Chri 
great social fact, with all its m d spirit 
splendors, is no longer to b< 



— 21 — 



supernatural product; then is it a natural product 
of Humanity, that is to say of the Human Race 
as a grand whole, working out its normal unity 
under the immutable natural laws imposed on 
it in the creation. How can any one, without 
proclaiming himself incapable of recognizing 
the moral and spiritual phenomena around him, 
and those presented by our past history, contrive 
to evade the cogency of this consideration? It 
were easy enough, at all events, to go on to the 
next step, viz. that Christianity, relatively to 
all the past the supreme product oi Humanity, 
although possibly destined to be absorbed in some 
still higher development, must necessarily be 
utterly incapable of simply dying out and dis- 
appearing. Dropping indeed its supernaturalism, 
which, indispensable at the outset, when any 
other basis for religion would have been incon- 
ceivable, has been for several centuries past its 
one constant source of weakness, and now at 
last of almost total paralysis, it must necessarily 
be destined, as to all its fundamental and essential 
characteristics, as an Ideal of Human Existence, 
an embodiment of noblest and divinest Human 
Aspirations, not merely to perpetuation, but to 
a large development of its efficacy and power. 



For religion is one, continuous and eternal : it 
is only the dogmas that differ and change with 
the increase and development of the p< 
knowledge of Manki i suppose that Reli- 

gion, to suppose, th< . that Chri 

anity, is capabL m in any 

grand and sublime ehara< ly hun 

and purely natural as all tl itly 

are, on the theory, that is to uni- 

versality of Natural Lav. . 
any mind with e\ 
instruction. The hun 
our modern occidental civilization, 

rather to perish 

The same tli : nly 

of ( Christianity but of .ill tl tiled d 

religions upon the of this globe. The 

dogmas of the p; all alike ficti 

the religio all alike real and true 

speak more exactly, R ual, 

indestructible, unchai 
to a progressive, ever 
lopment. ' 

of absolute equality . tl 

Religious S3 the Pa all 

beings on this 



— 23 — 

hierarchical. All the religious dogmas of the 
past, and all the different religious systems based 
upon them, have been indeed perfectly natural 
developments of the Human Race, all tending 
towards a Final Unity, truly sublime and glorious, 
first attempted in the form of Universal Empire, 
but afterwards in the very much higher form 
spontaneously indicated by Catholicism, that of 
a Universal Church, in which form alone it is 
susceptible of a complete, final realization. The 
General History of the Human Race, and the 
History of Religion, the one and the other alike 
truly told, are in fact one and the same thing. There 
never has been and there never can be any 
Human wSociety that is not based upon Religion, 
in the scientific, or what is the same thing the 
universal, sense of the word Religion. In my 
last year's Lecture*) the long, unbroken line 
of gradual progress was traced from the Feti- 
chistic cradle of the Human Race, up to and 
including the Great Roman Empire, which laid 
the most essential foundations of our modern 
Occidental Society, but still needed certain in- 
dispensable conditions that were spontaneously 



*) „Auguste COMTE and the Philosophy of History". 
( Hitherto unpublished). 



— 24 — 

developed in fact by the Feudo-Catholic Civili- 
zation of the Rfiddle-Ages, viz: (1) The double 
emancipation of the; Working Men and of Won. 
(2) the development of a ral Culture 

independent of sternal, 

closely connected with thi 
of the Spiritual Power from t ; <'- temporal 
All these mere! tnd th 

provisional, forms ol 1 
Christianit an id< 

existence, ideal \ 

velopment carried up to a high 
perfection, and attaining under Chri 
veritable sublimity. In this raerelj 
state, however, i em has 

capable of maintainii 

to be permanent, and i i [uman 

Society forward continuously, and wit my 

further break, towards its I 

and the Ideal til indeed tin \ tlutely 

one) must both b< 

the advent o\ positive knowl< 

Laws ol Human Nature ] and individual. 

Die scientific synthesis, th< 

the adherents of all th< 

the means of attaining with certaii 



— ^5 — 

which are common to them all, laying aside 
nothing" but just those divergences, closely linked 
with the variations in dogmas all alike fictitious, 
which have struck them all alike with paralysis, 
but naturally struck with the greatest severity 
the most advanced. 

The impression generally prevailing, wherever 
there exists only a vague and superficial know- 
ledge of the Positive Doctrine, that this doctrine 
is atheistic, is equally baseless and erroneous 
with the idea of its contradicting and being a 
rival of Christianity. Science, accounting for all 
phenomena on the principle of immutable natural 
law, ceases entirely no doubt to recur to the 
Divine Will as any explanation of phenomena. And 
Specialist Science, occupying itself exclusively 
with purely material phenomena or with vital phen o - 
menainapurely materialistic spirit, seeking to re- 
present them as identical with the merely chemical 
and physical, exerts an irresistibly materialistic and 
atheistic influence, even without any direct con- 
tradiction of theological dogmas, influence indeed 
that does not become in the legist degree less 
energetic, by means of the profession of Christian 
beliefs, let it be ever so sincere, on the part of 
the savans who cultivate it. The reading public 



— 26 — 

feels that such a profession is a contradiction; 
the majority, at least among the more active 
minds, go farther, and set it down as an in- 
sincerity, a prudent and indeed wise hypocri 
which they will do well to imit >r this 

materialistic and atheistic influem rids mainly 

on the striking contrast b< luded to, b« 

the certainty, clearness, precision and pr 
utility of scientific con< 
synonymous, so far as th< 

arc concerned, with materialist'' — 

and the uncertaintx . ncy 

and growing practical U 
conceptions. And this atheistic influen 
much increased by the • 
resist it. seeing that th< 
in the absence of the scientific synt 
the form of persistence in claiming the exclu- 
sively supernatural basis of ! n and I 
Church, and the absolute : .ty. thei 
the sake o\ maintaining tl 4 main 
also, however imj 

natural. Tl I faith of the savans, the I 

and journalistic class, the men o\ the world, 
who pretend to accede to ti. 
something more than doubtful. 



ever the Supernatural is laid aside completely 
and systematically, one can immediately begin 
to see that if Science, in its religious synthesis, 
is perfectly silent in regard to the existence of 
God, and the divine creation of the universe, 
that silence does not in the smallest degree imply 
any negation. What the Positive Philosophy*) 
asserts, in regard to all such questions as those 
of absolute origins and absolute existence, is 
simply that they are utterly inaccessible to all 
our means of positive knowledge, and that 
therefore the human mind tends, spontaneously 
and irresistibly, to abandon their discussion in 
favor of the positive knowledge offered by 
science. In this it only seconds the theological 
doctrine itself, which does not pretend to base 
itself on Science, but on the contrary on Faith. 
Moreover, the silence of the scientific synthesis 
is a respectful, a reverential silence. It is simply 
abstinence from the vain presumption by which 
finite man, with his so limited powers and capa- 



*) The Positive Philosophy is at bottom simply the coor- 
dination of the fundamenta] principles, underlying at once Positive 
Science itself, and its several logical methods, or rather different 
degrees of development of a one same method. But, by a legi- 
timate extension of the signification, the term may be employed 
as synonymous with the Scientific Synthesis itself. 






cities, pretends to grasp the Infinite One, and 
discuss familiarly 1 1 : 

: mplv the ind 

wise, whi< I ambit 

that would fain 

depths, the in 

!! to th( within 

•1). and in ' 

abundantly pr 
needs and his m< 

relative I 
to the mat dly 

pro 1 

sonable loi ard 

to I 

Creation of the Qi 

of mere teeliiu 

upward- towards ible, n< 

be more rational than I 
tin* limits 
be, there mus 
different with th< 



— 29 — 

that is within the sphere of the Knowable 
supreme, is positively known to us, that Know- 
able Supreme must needs be, relatively to us, 
in the direction of the Unknowable Supreme in 
the Beyond, and the most perfect Representation 
of that Absolute Supreme that can by any 
possibility be even conceivable by us. In this 
idea there is at all events a ground for Belief in 
God, far superior in cogency to any that a simply 
theological Dogma can offer, while here also — 
and this may be still more important — there 
is a complete conciliation between the Scientific 
Synthesis, with its total silence in regard to the 
creation of the Universe, the Divine Existence, 
and every thing else in the sphere of the 
Unknowable, and the most profound, the most 
devout belief both in the Divine Existence and 
in the Creation. 

The Scientific Synthesis demands, no doubt, 
a conception of God, and especially of the 
Relations between God and Man, different from 
those that have hitherto prevailed; but those 
which it tends to substitute are infinitely better 
adapted to inspire adoration, and present the 
most striking contrast to the semi-contemptuous 
indifference and scepticism which actually charac- 



terize so large a proportion of the nominal 

Catholics and nominal Christians of to-day. All 

the modification, in fact, which the scientific 

synthesis imposes on the belief in God and in 

the divine creation of the Universe is, that 

instead of supposing to have created a 

disorderly World, so to need 

constant interventions of the divin< 

Will, in order to protect I lis own eternal purp< i 

from defeat by the spontai He 

had Himself implanted in 1 itures, such a 

belief must re< that God, whom the 

( Christian Scriptures ..in 

whom there is no vari 

shadow L, on the contra 

a perfectly orderly world, s 

and so profoundly ord< at by virtue 

the principles an< ed in it 

the creation itself — princi] 

which in their actual OJ I to 

us by positive science under the name of immu- 
table natural laws - it spontaneous 
out, without any further info un- 

changing pur] ' the Enfin r. And 

in thus humbly resigning ourselves to the 
fact,thatthe sphere of Eternal M3 ;boundl< 



— 31 — 

and the sphere of positive Human Knowledge 
very narrowly circumscribed, not only have we to 
be penetrated with profound gratitude for the 
far higher and diviner conception of God thus 
brought within our reach, and for the general 
fact, indeed, that pre-eminently in this spiritual 
sphere are our real needs and our means of 
acquiring positive knowledge strictly conter- 
minous; but in recognizing the real, the absolute 
God to be necessarily unknowable, and the 
completely demonstrable Humanity to be neces- 
sarily the highest humanly conceivable Repre- 
sentation of the Divine Existence, and therefore 
the direct object of our worship, as well as of 
our supreme affection and our constant and 
devoted service, we are delivered at one stroke 
from all the immense, the insurmountable diffi- 
culties, moral as well as intellectual, which have 
always heretofore marred the perfectness of our 
adoration, and dimmed the brightness of our 
faith. No human soul can ever completely 
surmount the terrible moral difficulty involved 
in the fact, that it is totally impossible really 
to conceive of an Omnipotent Creator who is 
not necessarily the Author of all Evil as well 
as of all Good, until one bows in humble sub- 



— 3^ — 

mission before the fact, that the Absolut* 
necessarily the unknowable, and the Suprei 
Being whom we can really know, and there! 
really worship and faithfully 

■ve, must n< only the 

supreme. This humble i nt sub: 

once accomplished, nothi 
mar the profound and enthu 
naturally, n 

of the 

towards a more and 

under the SU] blind 

Fatality into 

While the same 

us, at the 

once to our rationali 

by the sp< 

petual rig and tinkei 

handiwork oi tl 

Creator's own des 

hitherto so profoundly shackled. illy dur 

n cent centuries, th< 

seem to threaten 1 [er now with 

tinction, all disap] 

o\ Christianity, its noble moral 

intact, only developed still hi 



— 33 — 

diviner level, remain planted on a foundation 
utterly irrefragable and immovable. 

For the scientific synthesis completely de- 
monstrates the absolutely unquestionable validity 
of all the practical side of Christianity. It sets 
aside its supernaturalism and that which depends 
wholly and exclusively upon that supernaturalism. 
But only mostprofoundly to confirm, and in fact in- 
corporate into itself, all the rest, all, without suffer- 
ing one jot or one tittle to pass away unfulfilled.*) 
And how little indeed is it that thus disappears! How 
infinitely greater is that which remains, restored 
in fact by the scientific synthesis, by it picked 
up out of the mire and mud into which it has 
been so long trampled by an atheistic and fan- 

*) Of course it can hardly be necessary to explain here, 
what will be spontaneously comprehended by every well regu- 
lated mind, that these expressions give not the smallest coun- 
tenance to the pretensions of the unauthorized and incompetent 
to hang their own crude schemes upon the literal expressions 
of the Xew Testament, or any other Text whatsoever. Modern 
society will certainly not go back, for instance, to the Commu- 
nism of the Early Christians, or any other form of anarchical 
Equalitarianism, alike chimerical and degrading, and degrading 
most of all to the popular mass. Besides, it is the scientific 
synthesis that is the supreme Authority as to the question, Avhat 
it is that constitutes Christianity, as Religion, when the theo- 
logical dogma is laid aside. Only it is certainly not the omissions 
that will ever shock, or be complained of by, any Christian 
whomsoever, be he ever so fervent, devout and self sacrificing. 

3 



— 34 — 

fastical philosophy, a materialistic science and 
a still more materialistic and atheistic Industrialism, 
which, in its actual unregulation, individualism 
and anarchy, is no progress at all, but only a 
hideous, infernal monster devouring its own 
children. There is no progress at all, but only 
an unspeakable degradation; something far lower 
down than any mere retr ion, in the 

u]) as the [deal, the real and | A [deal 

men, and even <>t women too, the veritable 
of worship and service for at 
the seven, and with a constantly growing tendency 
to include all the seven, to mak< the temple 

services themselves subordinate to this really 

dominant ideal, the Sardanapalian Ideal — the 

( retting, the 1 laving and the Enjoyii rial 

objects and selfish g ns. ITu 

synthesis decisively demonstrates, thai and 

spiritual realities of human nam ally 

that which has been SO admirably I 
the Catholic Mystics as the Interior Lite, and I 
sublime social and moral destin human 

race revealed by Christianity, an grandly 

and nobly worked out by the Christian Church 
in the past, especially by th( lerable 

Catholic Church of the Middle that truly 



— 35 — 

heroic period of religion and morality ; are none 
of them dependent in the smallest degree upon 
the theological dogmas with which they were 
historically linked, and ten centuries ago, in 
fact, necessarily linked. The theological dogmas 
may utterly disappear, but all this other side 
of Christianity, the really and eternally grand, 
sublime, truly divine side, will remain intact, 
not a jot nor a tittle of the spirit of it being 
disturbed or compromised in the smallest degree, 
this ^spirit that giveth life" being protected the 
rather against any further possibility of being 
sacrificed to „the letter that killeth". Christianity, 
in fact, in all that practically constitutes its 
essential elements, is only confirmed, placed on 
the immovable, irrefragable basis of positive 
demonstration, carried up moreover to yet higher 
flights of sublimity. All this higher side of 
Christianity, all the very essence of the Christian 
Religion remains, as the Eternal Aspiration of 
our race, gradually developed athwart the 
centuries, by the ministry of the highest and 
most exquisite individual products of that race. 
It remains as the undying Ideal of the race, 
yes, and its predestined end too. In spite of all 
the grovelling tendencies which so strikingly 

3* 



- 36 - 

mark the passing hour, Mankind will still go on 
struggling upward towards the ideal gradually 
developed by our race, and which ideal, con- 
stituting the essential characteristic of human 
nature, evidently has for its true name Huma- 
nity, seeing that it is it which differentiates that 
human nature from mere brute nature, from 
that merely animal and vegetative life which 
the dominant philosophy would fain <nt. 

with the addition simply of a beaver-vulpine 
intellect, as the whole of our human nature. 
And the scientific synthesis comes now. th< 
fore, not merely to furnish a do un- 

dation that nothing can ever in the small* 

degree shake, on which the Culture of the [deal 
may be gradually re-instituted, in proportion 
the old theological dogmatic ails it — 

and the theological dogma does in fact abandon 

the moral ideal to a far j 

than it is itself openly abandoned by cotem- 
porary opinion — but it come to render 

to the ideal and its culture, in other wt 
religion, a yet further service 
coming far more immediately i and ener- 

getic. It comes, in fact to make it possible 
for the theological dogmas, or rather tor the 



— 37 — 

theological churches, so far as they yet retain 
any hold at all upon the modern mind, to con- 
secrate themselves once more to the energetic 
service of the noble Christian Ideal, the admirable 
christian moral type ; and thereby regain, as 
most unquestionably; in following so dignified 
a policy they could not fail to do, a very large 
measure of their ancient social prestige and 
glory, and even of their purely spiritual power. 
For the Scientific Synthesis entirely 
sustains Christianity in its general representation 
of human nature as needing a profound regen- 
eration, and of the true destiny of man 
as consisting in the eternally progressive 
consecration of his merely exterior existence 
to the culture and development of a noble in- 
terior existence, under the guiding influence of 
an ideal of moral and spiritual perfection, which 
becomes only the higher and diviner for being 
referred directly to Humanity; under the reac- 
tions of which interior life he has, on pain 
of forfeiting his true destiny and sinking into a 
degradation which has no name, to more and 
more subordinate, in his practical life also, his 
egotist and animal instincts, the lower side of 
his nature, to the social sympathies and disin- 



- 3« - 

terested impulsions , to tliat Universal Love 
which the Christian Scriptures declare to be 
essentially identical with the Divine Nature 
itself.*) In all this it manifestly presents a marl. 
indeed glaring contrast to spe< 
and other doctrines claiming at this day a more 
or less scientific character, and pursuing, or at 
least tending towards, the same general i 
specialist science, viz, the mat 
dation of our human kind. But in proport 
Auguste Comte advanced I corapl 

systematization of th( synthesis, furnish- 

ing thus to religion a d 
superior to any she had been able b< 
he, at the same time, and by the same on, 

more and more clearly den the en 

nature of the distinction I 

iigion, and the imperative necessity of subordina- 
ting in practice the Dogma, which is but 
to the Religion, which is the supr md in- 

dispensable end. It was naturally a hard lesson 
to teach to neophytes, enraptured with tin 
session o\ a system combining the highest 
ceivable sublimity in the doctrines, with 
nitic solidity in the foundations. It wa 

*) n God is Love." i John IV. 



— 39 — 

misfortune that a premature death took him 
away from us, before he had had time sufficiently 
to impress upon his disciples the necessity, if 
they would be full)" consistent with the whole 
of the teachings of moral and sociological science, 
of systematically subordinating dogmatic instruc- 
tion to the development of religious practices. 
This, however, will be the distinctive charac- 
teristic of the grand movement of religious re- 
construction, and social and moral regeneration, 
that will necessarily spring up, sooner or later, 
on the basis presented to religion by the scien- 
tific synthesis. The positivist Religious Propa- 
gande will bear no resemblance whatever to 
the formation of a new sect in the bosom of 
our modern society, or employ any of the 
methods one would expect on the part of a 
new religion. The positive religion of Huma- 
nity is not, properly speaking, a new religion. 
Sociological science has demonstrated that 
religion is essentially one. For religion 
is, at bottom, the systematic development of 
the Human Unity, social and individual. Let 
theological beliefs disappear totally, that Cul- 
ture of the Human Unity, which has in fact 
grown up spontaneously under their aegis, will 



— 4 o — 

have lost not one tittle of its importance. It 
will remain in the future, what it has been in 
the past, the indispensable foundation of Human 
Existence, both social and individual. The actual 
revolutionary state on one side, of which state 
temporal repression serves only to increase 
the intensity, and on the other side the constant 
eind progressive increase of nervous disorders, 
insanity and suicide, concurrently with the 
immense improvement of sanitary conditions, 
far as regards those merely physical and chemical, 
are more than cibundantly sufficient demonstration 
of this fact. Refusing the Jiamc of Religion to 
that culture, which all the so-called religions of 
the past actually did furnish, but which theo 
logical religions have become powerless to main 
tain, their forces being absorbed in the fruitless 
struggle to maintain a belief in their dogmas, 
makes no difference whatever to the fact of the 
indispensable necessity of this systematic culture 
of the social and individual unity, which, whether 
called religion or not, is equally man's supreme 
necessity.*) And for this culture the scientific syn- 

*) When it is considered that in this sense the word 
„unity a is synonymous with „sanity a (in the fully integral - 
of this latter word), the undeniable character of the assertion 
in the text becomes manifest. 



— 4 i — 

thesis demonstrably furnishes incomparably the 
most perfect dogmatic foundation imaginable. 

Now the energy of religion ; as such a culture, 
resides in its practices, above all in its Worship. 
Simply making the Positive Dogma the basis of the 
system of Public Instruction, would in nowise suf- 
fice to terminate the modern anarchy and disorder, 
even if it were possible, which it certainly is not, 
in the absence of the corresponding religion. But 
the only Religious Practices based wholly on the 
scientific synthesis which are not at this day pre- 
mature, are the purely personal; and the positivisc 
religious propagande will, therefore, necessarily 
aim especially, and at first almost exclusively, at 
the dissemination of the practice of the purely per- 
sonal positive prayer, and address itself by prefer- 
ence, therefore, to the isolated individual. For it is 
evidently only the purely personal practices that 
can sufficiently prepare for any collective adora- 
tions ; while these again can in the first instance 
be only purely domestic. It is only after a long pre- 
paration in these more restricted spheres, the purely 
personal and the domestic, that the grand and sub- 
lime Festivals of the fully Public Worship of FIu- 
manity can be practically inaugurated, and that only 
in a social situation spontaneously prepared for it by 



— 4 2 — 

that evolution in opinion, from Theology towards 
Positive Science, which is going on everywhere 
throughout our modern European society, and 
producing, as long as the evolution remains 
purely spontaneous, and therefore necessarily 
irreligious, more and more profound social dis- 
orders, disorders which in fact nothing but the 
inauguration of the Public Worship of Humanity 
can ever definitively terminate. 

Meantime the Positivist School, simply as a 
School of Science and Philosophy, pursues its 
calm, quiet, dignified but unobtrusive action upon 
public opinion, action becoming gradually irres 
tible, by virtue of the profound harmony between 
its teachings and the spontaneous and immutable 
tendencies of modern Thought. It may be per- 
mitted to the Lecturer to remark here, incident- 
ally, the striking contrast presented by the action 
of this school to that of the partisans of other 
modern doctrines, substituting as it does a calm, 
patient, unobtrusive public instruction, for the 
noisy discussions and popular agitations by which 
our modern society is harassed and fatigued, in 
the interest of all sorts of doctrines and schemes 
each of which would fain impose itself by force, 
and violence upon a reluctant public. 



— 43 — 

But still, however certain the ultimate 
triumph and universal prevalence of the scien- 
tific synthesis may be, Auguste Comte saw 
finally, that the object and aim which constituted 
the supreme, all-mastering passion of his life, 
the definitive surmounting of the modern anarchy 
and disorder, needed yet another and more de- 
cisive line of action, on the part of his more 
unhesitating and radically faithful followers. 
While he had fulty demonstrated that the Social 
Inauguration of the Systematic Worship of 
Humanity, is the only possible means of definit- 
ively terminating the actually existing and ever- 
growing revolutionary agitation, the task of 
accomplishing this Inauguration is one which 
may very possibly occupy at least whole gener- 
ations yet to come, although perfectly certain 
to be accomplished sooner or later. The question 
therefore necessarily arose, the question moreover 
of incomparably the most pressing and immediate 
importance : what can be done in the meantime 
to arrest the progress of this revolutionary agi- 
tation, and prevent the terrible conflagrations 
with which it threatens our modern society. 
Auguste Comte, in this situation, so full of dan- 
gers, strongly urged upon his disciples the 



— 44 — 

duty of employing the scientific synthesis, first 
and foremost, as a means of enabling the actual 
churches to regain much of the social prestige 
and purely spiritual power of which they have 
been quite wrongly, irrationally and altogether 
empirically deprived. It is only ignorance — 
sociological ignorance — on the part of the public, 
that makes it attribute to the religion and the 
moral ideal of Christianity, the discredit at this 
day inevitably attaching to its dogma. There is 
not the smallest shadow of any justification, fur- 
nished by science as a whole, for the actually 
prevailing religious scepticism and indifference. 
It is this prevailing religious indifference that 
is the source whence is being distilled the spi- 
ritual dynamite, that threatens one day to ex- 
plode, no one can tell how soon, and strew all 
Europe with ruins. It was therefore the duty oi 
his disciples, those at all events who aspired 
to carry on the great religious work, for which 
the scientific synthesis furnished the dogmatic 
foundation, to take their stand between the 
christian churches on one side, and atheistic and 
materialistic science, in a word specialist science, 
and the metaphysical philosophy in all its forms, 
on the other side, and, in the name of synthetic 



— 45 — 

science and positive philosophy, to defend the 
cause of a sound spirituality, the Cause of Reli- 
gion, the cause of Christianity, the cause of the 
Churches themselves, therefore, so far as regards 
all their purely spiritual interests, and so to make 
it possible for them to resume their old attitude 
of spiritual and moral energy, whereby they 
would inevitably regain very much of their long- 
lost social prestige, and so be able, by bracing 
up the general moral tone, and infusing some 
little beginning at least of moral regulation into 
our practical and industrial life, to rescue our 
modern civilization from the imminent dangers 
which threaten it. It is mainly the fact that, by 
the decay of theological religion, our industrial 
life is given over at this day to utter material- 
ism and practical atheism, in other words to a 
state of total moral anarchy and unregulation, 
that has exposed modern society to its present 
dangers. And it is very plain that, in the actual 
state of public opinion, the Temporal Govern- 
ment is totally powerless to deal effectually with 
our modern Industrial Life, its attempted inter- 
ference, indeed, running serious risk of increasing 
the actual evils. The theological churches, whose 
dogma is adapted only to an essentially military 



r 46 - 

society, are totally incompetent alone to regu- 
late a society become radically industrial: Posi- 
tive Sociology and Positive Moral Science are 
indispensable guides in an operation so difficult 
and so delicate: but, resuming their ancient 
function, in the Middle Ages so admirably sus- 
tained, of the culture of the human heart, the 
development of noble sentiments of devotedness 
and universal love, the systematic prevalence 
of which can alone give a real dignity to Human 
Individual Existence, while alone furnishing a 
secure foundation for the Social Harmony, they 
could not fail to experience a very large measure 
of rehabilitation in public opinion, seeing that 
in all that supremely important element of the 
christian doctrine, which ought to be regarded 
as its true, its highest end, it has now positive 
science fully on its side, reaffirming, on just 
those logical foundations which experience has 
proved to be irrefragable, all its fundamental 
assertions. The supernatural element in the 
theological dogma inevitably remains under its 
actual discredit; but still with this difference, 
that while the scientific synthesis recogni, 
the impossibility of any systematic assertion in 
the sphere of the absolute, it protects even this 



— 47 — 

element of the theological doctrine from systematic 
denial. In the very act of transforming positive 
science into religious dogma, the scientific 
synthesis proclaims unhesitatingly, and in un- 
mistakeable terms, the necessary supremacy of 
religion, irrespectively of all dogmatic differences, 
as the only basis on which Human Society can 
by any possibility ever rest. It paves the way 
thus for a Universal League of Religion, in 
which all the different Christian Churches, not 
to speak of other Religions, may, on the com- 
mon basis of the separation of the spiritual 
power from the temporal power, but without 
any compromising formal compact on the part 
of any one of those Churches, and simply by 
tacitly abstaining from sacrificing their Religion 
to their Dogma, present an essentially united 
front to the common Enemy, the hydra-headed 
enemy, whose general name is Irreligion, among 
whose many heads we see the hideous forms 
of Vice, Sensualism, Selfishness, Disorder, Revolt, 
Despotism, Anarchy. Positive Science in fact, 
after having so long been the enemy of reli- 
gion, becomes henceforth its faithful servant. 
No doctrine can henceforth, pretending to be 
positive science, fail in this condition, without 



_ 4 8 - 

stamping upon its own brow the indelible brand 
of Charlatanism. But the abject slave of reli- 
gion, no, by no means: that were an infidelity 
to its high calling. To pretend to treat that 
true which is known not to be true; to pretend 
to treat that as certain which is known to be 
beyond our means of rational in ion — 

that on the pan ience, or it 

organs, were a treas 

itself, perpetuating the &m, 

Doubt and Uncertainty inthissph< that 

the possibility is fully demons! 
an end for ever to tfa 
the weakness, and indeed of the \ 
of religion, whirl llv 

to deplore. And it is to In- 
timate prominence thi 
and of the part to be played in it by tie 

ti\e Religion of Humanity, and ally in 

the Development of the Universal I 
Religion, that the Lecturer is writing the litl 

work before alluded 

What has been during the presefl ry 

railed Philosophical History, pl< itly 

at just the same point of \ 

t Simplc and snmmai 
Religion of Human 



— 49 — 

Sociology. It studies social phenomena as the 
natural products of their antecedents; and as ten- 
ding naturally to bring about their consequences. 
It does so however only tacitly and not system- 
atically; in order to avoid an open and direct 
contradiction of the theological dogma ; side by 
side with which it has to contrive to subsist, as 
part of the same official system of public in- 
struction. None the less does this same Philo- 
sophical History treat religion as ; in its purview, 
simply a social phenomenon, a purely natural 
phenomenon. Its professors may be ever so 
much nominally christians, but none the less is 
the influence of their teachings upon theological 
beliefs the same as that of the scientific spe- 
cialists, except that the materialistic and atheistic 
tendency is still more pronounced and deci- 
sive. It institutes for the intellectually cultured 
classes; and indeed for the reading public 
generally, a complete personal emancipation 
from the very last trace of any real belief, 
either in theological dogmas or in the religion 
based upon them, generally combined, it is true, 
with an external profession of the officially pre 
vailing religion, be it w T hat it may, and with 
just sufficient external conformity to its practices 



to avoid any open appearance of rupture. Such 
a conformity, in itself wise no doubt. : -led 

to aid in impe m the less instruct 

timed to be in of the 

of religion, and on the low 

• ly in greater i lolatiori 

in the only doctrin< nerally 

capable of furnishing to r tble 

dogmatic foundation. 1 he mol 
and indeed \\ nly 

the churches, the catholic church i dly, 

cannot be blamed for n uch 

a support and rrpie 

hesion, however mai 

catholic church has nr 

the 

tion, least of all that eminent body which 

this da] 

force. It was simply im] 

situation. [Tie Church had neither fulcrum I 

lever. Men's real beliefs \\ i 

side, Not a singl 

any longer willii lend it U the 

temporal arm: and, b< 

experience had shown the ii 

temporal arm. in our occidental * 



— 5* - 

accomplish anything in the spiritual sphere 
beyond the intensification of its disorder. How- 
ever excellent the motive and intention, the 
method of the specialist savans and of the phi- 
losophical historians, was, from its very first 
inception, in spite of the warm and almost en- 
thusiastic reception it met with in the great 
world, doomed to inevitable failure, if only by 
one radical and fatal vice, viz : that of being 
in direct opposition to the fundamental tendencies 
of Human Nature. The scheme overlooked two 
or three of the principal facts in the case, over- 
sight rather singular on the part of savans and 
philosophers, who pride themselves especially 
on the strictest fidelity to natural realities, on 
being indeed above the reach of human delu- 
sions. It overlooked these three facts among 
others: (1) That it is men's real beliefs that are 
apt to control their actual life; (2) that inferiors 
are very apt to imitate their betters, especially 
in following the bent of their spontaneous in- 
clinations; (3) that information of all kinds tends 
to spread itself more rapidly than ever at this 
day, when a certain degree of education, just 
enough at all events to be dangerous, is being 
every where popularized, the temporal govern- 



ments themselves aiding 1 . Ft is hard to find to- 
day a rural nook sufficiently remote from Kail- 
roads, Telegraphs and Newspapers not to furnish 
peasants, who may be heard saying ach 

other over their cups : ..< >ur M 
believe in God, but they don't believe in Him 
themselves". And unhappily tl ily too 

many demagogical 
the dangers necessarily 1 in such a 

situation. 

Now it is by openly and systematically 
recognizing the subordination of social and moral 
phenomena to immutable natural law, 
I )\ namic Socioloj 

unimpeachable validit] ol all that tl left in 

Christianity when the supernatural element 
dropped out, I" stop just now ay fur- 

ther and more detailed demon 
fact would take too long, and uKl 

be going beyond the limit 
and various consider 
rhe question belongs rather, 
further demonstration may be w 
little work ai>o\ e spok< 

But by pretending 
the officially prevailing religion, to submit 



— 53 — 

solutel} r to the officially established churches, 
and swallow whole and entire their theological 
dogma, which dogma their own works render 
totally incredible to any man of common sense 
who really gives credence to those works, the 
Specialist Savans and Philosophical Historians 
create precisely the most dangerous elements 
of all in the actual situation. They do now 
what the casuists did formerly, only for a dif- 
ferent and now very much wider class. They 
institute, for the reading world, a combination 
between a merely external and perfunctory ad- 
hesion, which no longer deceives any body, and 
a profound, only half concealed scepticism rela- 
tive, not merely to the theological scaffolding 
of Christianity, but to all its sublime moral and 
social Ideal, to that same sublime social and 
moral Ideal of which sociological Science, on 
the contrary, demonstrates irrefragably the essen- 
tial reality and unimpeachable validity. That 
merely external adhesion served a valuable, and 
indeed indispensably necessary, purpose two or 
three centuries ago, even down to, if not long 
after, the days of the Lettres provtnciales, not- 
withstanding that the eminent Author of these, 
dreaming of a veritable resuscitation of Theology, 



— 54 — 

was naturally blind to the fact: but at this 

day it works most fatal mischief, weaken 

the Church instead of 

utterly paralyzing Her for any effective m< 

regulation, even of Her own sincere adl 

and .s<> creating the fatal indifferen 

gion which every where char es our modern 

civilization , preparii it th< I fated 

catastrophe 

II. 

The exposition now compl 
tions betwen the I rine and R. 

is by no means simply pn 
subject of to-day's I 

trary, a principal element in its i With- 

out it, it would be in and 

the positive theory of the Middle A. 
fact, any theory in the smallest tific- 

in regard to this most inter- but miserably 

ill-understood, period. For, instead ol lia\ 
been a period of darkness, and its civili 
as compared with the I Roman, a n 

gression, the Middle A.ges did in fact 
for mankind the g St and ; .Mime p 

greSS ever ael 



— 55 — 

The principal source of the false notions that 
have hitherto prevailed, in regard to this most 
decisive period of past histon r , consists in the 
total absence of any rational and consistent 
conception of what it is that constitutes Human 
Progress ; and of the supremely decisive relations 
subsisting between social progress proper and 
moral progress. The scientific synthesis alone 
makes clear what it is that constitutes progress, 
both the social and the moral ; and what is still 
more important, the real relations between Pro- 
gress and Order. In the two sentences just pro- 
nounced, the word ..order*' might be substituted 
for the word ..progress" (and in the last phrase 
the two words transposed) without any serious 
change in the meaning. For it is now demon- 
strated, that the only real and true progress is 
that which consists in the development of the 
Normal Order. While the one eternal moral 
problem of our Race, has been the subordination 
of the spontaneously predominant Egotism in our 
nature, to the Altruism whose prevalence is in- 
dispensable to our personal unity, its one eternal 
social aspiration has been its own Unity, 
end towards which it has constantly, amidst 
gigantic obstacles, slowly but surely advanced. 



In order to see clearly how very far the Middle 
Ages carried us along this double road, which 

essentially one, for the moral unity and 
social unity arc at a but two different 

phases oi a ime phenomenon, we D 

keep constantly in view tl the 

spiritual and the temporal, of which this d< 
sive period \\ the 

one .side, and on the L, built 

up tem which, while in< 

endurance un< then : 

incapable therefo 

tical fruits, did still, in d and funda- 

mental principles, ap] 
to the Normal Si 1 iuman 

alluded to in the Christian Scriptun the 

Kingdom rth, than 

thin- developed, nay Etnything barely im 
previously. In tart it was tli,- Sj 
to modern Thought by the Middle 

alone rendered possible the p 

of the Future state 

with a sufficiently relath - 

,\nd due allowance tor the then unavoidable ami 

insurmountable hind. -nditions on the • 

hand, and for the modi! 



— 57 — 

inevitable by the subsequent acquisitions of 
positive knowledge, the Middle Ages present 
us with a complete Synthesis of Human Aspi- 
rations. All that the Human Race, by its grea- 
test sages, had dreamed of and longed for as 
supremely desirable, all that Man has constantly 
struggled for, and fought for, and cheerfully gone 
through terrible sufferings to finally insure for his 
Kind, were all at last in the Middle Ages at- 
tained, at least in germ and in fundamental 
principle, but at every point needing for the full 
realization of the just and necessary practical 
results, certain conditions not then attainable, 
conditions which have become attainable only 
now, or rather, to speak more exactly, in the 
very near if not absolutely immediate Future ; 
yet of course not even then, or indeed at any 
time attainable without due effort, perhaps even 
heroic effort. Such blessings as we enjoy today 
cost our Forefathers very heroic effort: if we 
are no longer capable of such effort, our children 
must wait for their inheritance, ripe though it be 
in so many respects, until a nobler generation 
arise to achieve it. 

The fundamental feature of Feudalism, 
stripped of technicalities, of merely temporary 



accidents of the situation and merely transitional 

characteristics was the conciliation between 

concurrence and independence. 

had a large measure lepend< 

the common 

the general interests, \\ rar- 

chical subordinate ingdownvt 

the monarch all the way I ranks, 

who now, for the first time, ual 

sl,i\ en to nd thru finally 

tial freedom, in which th 

\ ergence w 

represented b I with 

sufficient stri< 

superior. Ihi> was tin- natural n nul 

Roman development, entirely irrespectivi 

the inroads ot barbariai 

taneous transformation ol rora 

;tate ol conqi ich 

had been accomplished, or at least pn 
tor. by the Roman Empire. ITie 
was purely spont >un- 

dest thinker of that 

mally expressed in 

nomenon then 

around him. He could n rm in his own 



— 59 — 

mind any sort of conception of it save the most 
vague and general. It was only the Roman Poet 
(with that astonishing intuitive insight and fore- 
sight, long ago observed as characterizing the 
true poet, but only now explained by positive 
moral science) who had indicated the veritable 
destination of the Roman arms, Jo impose upon 
Man by War the arts of Peace"*) But it is only at 



*) One hears at this day all sorts of talk, and boastings 
ad nauseam, about Progress: but is not this a rather strange 
„progress? a Twenty centuries ago, before the advent of Christi- 
anity even.) men could recognize the destination of war as 
purely transitional, being no other in fact than to render 

ible the institution of permanent and universal peace. But 
now, after all our r progress ", war is, if certain current theo- 
ries are valid, to be eternized by having for its function the 
extension of the commerce of „the Strong" peoples to the 
disadvantage of the "Weak ; disadvantage which includes (accor- 
ding to an unvarying experience) their slow death and ultimate 
extermination, sole definitive result hitherto, of all permanent 
contact between our Occidental Civilization, in its actual state 
of anarchy and demoralization, and any of the Backward Races 
still subsisting on this Globe. As a highly natural and indeed 
inevitable correlative of such a ^Progress", all the principles 
of Christianity, and indeed of morality in any shape, are openly 
defied, relatively to the collective (or political) action of man- 
kind, either systematically declared inapplicable, or treated with 
contempt as „sentimentalism". Meantime a wretched Quackery, 
that with cynical insolence dares usurp the sacred name of 
Science, starts up, ready to justify this modern mode of un- 
mitigated cannibalism, blasphemously dubbing it „Evolution!" 
And the Christian Churches stand by, shutting their eyes and 



— 6o — 

this day, and only by those initiated into i 
Positive Doctrine, that the full signii of 

the fact thus, as though by inspirati 
can l)'- fairly app now. n< 

tli.it the light i Lily 

conic, the great majority of minds will fail 
realize the social h they 

arc themselves unconsciously takin 

In the Middle Ages, [ndustry had not by 
any ra< tually replace ilti- 

mately definitive form i It 

needed all t : of th lual 

decay <>t the m< 
current gradual developmei 
in order to the plishm< this n 

decisive step toward 
dom of ( rod, in scientific I an] 
matic reign i A 1 [umanil 
e\ en then this final and defii 
of the social activity, piw ed i ible 

without a h is i 

stopping th< 
cracy, make then 

thin 

ih.it right speedily, unless 
torn to piec< 
ved fate, 



— 61 — 

an)'' means terminated, but in the midst of which 
we are still living. The transformation, however, 
of military activity, from a state of Conquest to 
a state of Defence, was a most important and 
indeed indispensable transition; and this tran- 
sition was virtually , although only spon- 
taneously, accomplished by the Middle Ages. 
Until, however, this transition, from being merely 
spontaneous becomes systematic, by the com- 
plete social prevalence of the corresponding 
theory, the chief benefits destined to flow from 
that great transformation are profoundly com- 
promised. For aggressive wars, even within 
the nominal Christendom, remain still possible, 
although ever more and more costly, ever in- 
flicting more and more cruel sufferings upon 
the nations, victors and vanquished alike. They 
are simply struck with radical and incurable 
sterility, and ever more and more so, their re- 
sults having, within our occidental civilization, 
no reliable permanence whatever, save only in 
the cases where those results might have been 
better attained without any war at all. Such 
wars, within the limits of that modern European 
or Occidental Civilization, have more and more 
the peculiarly malignant character which marks 



civil wars: they are more and more disorderly 
and revolutionary in their essential character, 
and add, more than any thing else in the pur 
temporal sphere, to the revolutionary agitation 
already so dangerously charactering our modern 
society. 

But the Feudo-catholic civilization, could 
fully effectuate only u ral principle the 

transformation oi conquest in and 

in no wise assure all t; ultima;- 

to be derived from tl iliatiori en per 

sona] independence and social co . which 

was essentially involved in tporal s; 

advantages necessarily reserved i< Normal 

State of Man upon the Karti 

.antic obst now 

working itself out, and a the final result 

irresistibly so. Feudalism introduced, ho 
especially by its supren in- 

comparable Institution of Chivalry, an in 

amelioration in the relation 

and Interiors, an am. m imi ibly 

greater than had ever been dp 

the most daring of Greek philosophic 

social speculators, and in comparison with which 

the subversive schemes of mod 



- 63 - 

simply contemptible. It was purely to Feu- 
dalism that we owe the fundamental concep- 
tion on which the normal social order essen- 
tially reposes ; so far as the purely temporal 
order is concerned viz: that Allegiance and 
Protection are reciprocal, principle that ; with 
all the modern anarchy and disorder, no one 
has dared openly to gainsay; it is simply ren- 
dered inefficacious, in the most important cases 
practically null ; by the absence of any effec- 
tive spiritual power, with a dogma in any 
wise applicable to a systematically industrial 
society. But it was Chivalry, and the ad- 
mirable moral development due to the Worship 
of the Virgin Mother, which Chivalry, more 
even than Catholicism itself so much shackled 
in its noblest inspirations as this latter is 
by its dogma, admirably cultivated and deve- 
loped, and by which in its turn it was itself 
so much ennobled — it was Chivalry that im- 
parted to this principle its highest perfection, 
and without being able to formulate the maxim 
\>y which the scientific synthesis characterizes 
this class of social relations, did still better, by 
furnishing practical illustrations which suggested 
that maxim to the Great Thinker : Devotedness of 



- 6 4 - 

the Strong to flic Weak, veneration of the 11 
for the Strong. 

The complete realization, however, of the 
normal conciliation between independence and 
concurrence can be due only to that other * 
dition, which the mediaeval civilization has the 
eternal honor of having >usly revealed 

to Man: the complete separation mni radical ///- 
dependend spiritual 

temporal. It is only under the 
versa! Church, fully representing public opini 
that vast, that imm< which, even 

this day, wholly deprh . 
in the least d< 

plainly its tend* ne Bnall) 

where supreme, that it will be md 

fully consistent with a national independei 

sternal 
local autonomy sufficiently I he mod< 

aspirations towap r permit (at b 

tom essentially the same thing 1 ) the detinii 

abandonment of the whole governmental system 

of militarism. But. ^w the one hand, 

dogma is, in practice, irreconcilable with 

effective reparation ot the tw 

withstanding the text of the ne* festan 



that seem expressly designed to furnish a dog- 
matic basis for it ; and notwithstanding also the 
indisputable fact that the mediaeval Church first 
gave to the world an actual example of a spir- 
itual power independent of all the various tem- 
poral governments, and yet uniting into a one 
spiritual Family, with a sufficient cohesion to be 
a complete defence against external attack, and 
also with a universally respected Umpire in in- 
terior international difficulties, a considerable 
number of peoples entirely independent of each 
other nationally and politically. 

But a theological dogma necessarily pushes 
a Church that is based upon it, e.ven in spite 
of the essential spirit of the corresponding Re- 
ligion (which is far from being absolutely iden- 
tical, or even necessarily in close harmony, 
with its dogma) towards a theocratic usurpation, 
as soon as ever it has sufficiently undisputed 
prevalence to make such a usurpation possible. It 
is not in the nature of things, that a priesthood, pro- 
fessing to speak in the name of an omnipotent God, 
a God, moreover, supposed to interfere directly, 
by supernatural and therefore inscrutable means, 
in the affairs of men, should limit itself strictly 
to offering counsels, when command is in any- 

5 



— 66 — 

wise within its grasp. And moreover to offering 
counsels which, whether public or private, are 
to remain fully liable to rejection by those to 
whom they are addressed, a rejection entir 
at their own option and on their own sole 
responsibility, responsibility limited exclusively 
to the inevitable acceptance of the purely natural 
consequences following such a r a, and 

also, in fact, to such consequer -ult 

from the direct or supernatural intervenl 
God Himself Such a limitation is. of cour 
practical result of the h< 

ration of the tw<> | . which is not only 

the fundamental and indisp* condit 

this day of all highly developed social 
but the still more in ble condition of all 

profound moral i /at ion. incomparably the n 
pressing need of our modern occidental civili 

tion. It is a sheer impossibility that any body of 
men, professing to speak in the name oi such a 
God should abstain from mand ; 

of limiting themselves purely I 

command has become possible tor them, and 

they have thus behind them an omnip- 

ready to back up their commands by a dip 

interference with the natural order, and tl 



to completely crush any attempt at resistance. 
It is quite impossible that a Priesthood, speaking 
in the name of a God of inscrutable purposes, 
who is the immediate superior alike of Pope 
and of King, should even imagine the possible 
existence of any obstacle to the employment of 
of temporal weapons in the enforcement of the 
Divine Commands, whenever it can in fact by 
any means procure the use of those weapons 
for any such purpose. Nay, such an enforcement 
must needs seem the duty of the Temporal 
Government. 

And even when the direct interference of 
the Divine Omnipotence in human affairs, by 
supernatural means, comes to be pretty generally 
regarded as essentially fabulous, so generally 
indeed that the priesthood itself cannot help at 
least half suspecting that such an appreciation 
is in accordance with realities, it cannot be in 
any wise an easy matter for a Priesthood, long 
habituated to the attitude of command, not only 
natural but essentially inevitable where there 
is a real and profound belief in the theological 
theory of Divine Government, to abandon defin- 
itively all direct or indirect recourse to tem- 
poral or material weapons, and limit itself ex- 

5* 



— 68 — 

clusively to purely spiritual instrumentalities, 

instrumentalities moral in the double sense of 

the term. The Catholic Church is entitled to v 

much more consideration than she has 

even in the most Catholic countries of our modern 

Europe, at the hands ol the statesmen. illy 

seeing that the only policy they have thus 

been able to oppose to the theo 

<>l that Church is the pur< n invoh 

in a return to th< mt, pre-chri 

— that of the confu in 

the hands of the remporal Ruler. But 

ity, in this its supreme condei 

ence, outside <»t the remporal I 

in the purely practical sphere sub 

of a ^kingdom" which world** 

and whose servants th< 

e, do not use temporal weapons, thos 

force, in the maintenance of tl 

oi their ^kingdom" (higher law destined 

finally to put an end to all fighting, to all 

that hideous barbarism called war* 

ity, in this its supreme charact 

wise liable to extinction, in nly 

avowed hostility of the p 

modern pi d the still more in\< 



- 69 - 

even if unavowed, detestation of the openly and 
systematically retrograde partisans of the actually 
prevailing system of Temporal Omnipotence. It 
is the indestructibility of Christianity, in this its 
essential culmination ; that makes this system so 
profoundly revolutionary; for it is it, at bottom, 
which is responsible for the whole of the actual 
situation. But for it ; all the other difficulties, 
and they are many and serious, no doubt, 
would all be surmountable, and even, compara- 
tively speaking, easily so. 

Modern opinion will certainly every where 
impose, sooner or later, aided especially by the 
terrible lessons of experience, the condition 
which the modern situation, looked at as a 
w T hole, so imperatively demands, the separation 
of the spiritual power from the temporal power, 
first and foremost as this condition is among 
those which can alone definitively terminate the 
actual revolutionary state, state moreover that 
is constantly and surely intensified by the efforts 
at material compression, indispensable of course, 
on the part of the temporal governments, as 
long as we have no socially recognized, genuine 
and efficacious solution of the present disorder 
and anarchy. But the Scientific Synthesis protests 



— 70 — 



energetically against the purely revolutionary 
measure, which, on a superficial view of the matter, 
may seem to be identical with the separation 
of the two powers, viz that commonly called 
the Separation of the Church from the State > and 
which conservatives would be everywhere per- 
fectly in the right in opposing by every effectual 
means possible, but which unhappily they aim 
always do oppose by means tending Infallibly 
to insure their own failure. For the separal 
of the two power indispensable a measure 

as the revolutionary ^separation of the chun 
from the state* is detestable and ruinous*) But 

*) i 
The sound 13 the maintenance o( the Chnrch l>> pu 

voluntary effort 1 
the people, especially of tl 
religious spirit, thai there the movement for tlu- 
the Church from the 

motive, ll is tl, : the 

people in this regard have in fact n 
a most admirable revival there 
even the English ^Society for the 1 

State Control 41 , (whose very name ; on the p. 

authors a remarkable instin sentiment oi the tr 

titic conception) must just me as to 

fairly embrace the separation ot tt 

completely clear its skirts o\ all vest :h a 

radically anti- christian, if not absolute] 

arvism. 



the revolutionary measure really means, not the 
so indispensable restoration of the social prestige 
and moral energy of the Church, certainly assured 
result of the sincere and honest separation of 
the two powers, but the speedy abolition and 
destruction of the Church and the consequent 
extirpation of religion. For it essentially consists 
in depriving Her of such prestige as results 
from Her recognition by the state, which is far 
from being absolutely nullified, so far as the 
peasantry is concerned at all events, by the 
slavery to the state in which She has at this 
day to exist, without at the same time giving 
Her the smallest possible compensation. As 
regards all the higher classes and the proletariate 
of the cities, the actual slavery of the Church 
to the State does no doubt utterly cripple, if 
not entirely paralyze, Her power for good, and 
more than any thing else — or at least with 
only one single exception, itself also due to 
the confusion of the two powers — intensify 
the materialistic and atheistic tendencies so un- 
happily prevalent, and which w^ould alas ! be 
only too energetic without this aid. She w r ould 
gain therefore immensely by the real separation 
of the hvo powers , far more indeed than she 



would lose by the revolutionary measure. But 
that revolutionary measure, while depriv 
the Church of such prestige as State 
nition can give Her, in the actual situation 
indispensable, proposes only to still further in- 
tensify the usurpation of spiritual prerogati 
by the state, which is in fact the source of the 
greatest of all the actual dangers to the 
of ( )nler in Kurope.*) 

*) I D ul- 

timate result, <>f the absolut 
in the hands of the 

plainly as tl; : 1 i c h 

could no doubt l' ed with Infallible 

one of our Euro] 
of imitating the 1< 

Nihilism is greatly ml 

confusion of the two 
dogma. Bui the Revolutii 

is just th. will 

find, when it 

steps in to reduce th< i 

the true meas 

the confusion of the ti the intei 

and practical atheism, in oi etaphysical Liberalism 

(only a euphonious synonyme for rank Indh 

is even more fatally dangerous in t: than 

the Russian Despotism, while at the same tmi illy 

destructh 

rhe true solution, by the by. tJOD in tin 

o( Russia, does not by any means 
Europe, in the direct separation of the 



- 73 - 

This digression into the very border land 
of concrete or practical politics, would be quite 
out of place here were it not that in the actual 
state of public opinion, and the long and prac- 
tically unquestioned reign of the fatally revo- 
lutionary system of Temporal Omnipotence, the 
modern mind would be unable really to grasp 
the true significance of that fundamental con- 
dition of normal social order, the separation of 



of realization every where, is simply impossible for Russia. Russia 
is very far from being included in our modern Western Civili- 
zation, and her interference in European politics properly so 
called , always morally a gross usurpation , is a perpetual 
menace to her own existence, but for which, in fact, she might 
after all have escaped the fearful visitation of Nihilism, a cancer 
in her bosom that is constantly growing. Russia is properly 
an Asiatic and Oriental Power, not European and Occidental. 
In Asia, if she can only learn in time where she has to stop, 
her rule is wholly beneficent, and will assure her a singularly 
glorious Future. But as to her European possessions, even such 
as are actually legitimate, her case is unique, and the true 
solution which it demands is destined , unless the persistent 
blindness of the Czars ruins her utterly, by precipitating her 
into a Constitutionalism totally unsuited to her situation and 
her magnificent possible Future, from which however nothing 
can save her except that true solution of her present most 
dangerous situation — to wipe out Nihilism as by a stroke of the 
pen, and, by a veritably magical transformation, render her, in 
an incredibly short space of time, the Envied among all nations, 
while placing her Czar among the very foremost names of all 
Human History. 



— 74 — 

the two powers, and indeed to form a clear and 

distinct conception of a true and genuine pur 

spiritual power, without some such concrete 

illustrations. But it was the service the Middle 

Ages rendered to the Normal Social Order of 

Humanity by the development of this conception, 

however premature may have been th< 

practipa] realization, now at last, I 

tively assured (unless indeed modern society, by 

persisting in the revoluti< mar . 

pieces altogether) which constitutes th 

title of this most decisis rnal 

gratitude and reverent admiration of our I< a 

The inevitable result, ho* the theocratic 

tendencies inexpugnably inherent in any ti. 

logical creed was, in tli< mirable 

mediaeval Catholic Church, that a struj <>se 

between I [er and the remporal 1 ' 

constantly maintained now * 

resulted in the complete subordination, 

say absolute slavery, of 

various Temporal Government 

countries that remain mo 

a subordination accomplished th« illy 

in great part by Catholics £hems< and in 

which Catholii eminent for their pi< 



/:> 



to have been subsequently sainted, as in the 
case of St. Louis of France, have taken an 
eminent part. When one reflects upon the in- 
finite blessings that would have flowed out upon 
all mankind had it only been possible for the 
eternally glorious Church of a St. Augustine and 
a Hildebrand, a St. Bernard and an Innocent III, 
a St. Francis of Assisi and a St. Elizabeth of 
Hungary, to have gone on unchecked in Her 
beneficent career, it is impossible not to regret 
profoundly that, in fact, the development of 
modern society had to be accompanied, inevi- 
tably, by a constant and progressive decay of 
that Church. Not but what Modern Society, when 
it shall at last have accomplished its destiny: 
the inauguration of the Normal State of Man 
upon the Earth, will have been well worth all 
it will have cost; but how fearful has been that 
cost! On one side five centuries of utterly 
useless, more and more bloody and barbarous 
Wars, becoming finally veritable orgies of 
fiends ! On the other hand the Terrible Spectre 
of modern Revolution, now actually looming up 
into ever more and more hideous proportions, 
laughing, with its ghastly grin, at all the vain 
efforts of merely material and physical compres- 



- 76 - 

sion, as though to demonstrate, beyond the last 
possible vestige of doubt, the radical impotence 
of merely temporal instrumentalities in the spir- 
itual spherel And who knows how Ion. 
actual transitionary stato ill of d 

well as countless m . may not ha. 

to last! 

But a Spiritual Power to be able to main- 
tain itself in Modem ty must 
pure. It must possess v. 
talkies of a purely spiritual i 

native force and energy enough to enable it to 
dispense with any sort 1 from the tem- 

poral Arm. Nay, it must utterly 
itself all such aid, and - 

smallest \ i iny sanction, I 

any interference whai trm, 

in any direction, within the spiritual 

must have so full and undoubf 

based moreover upon i .in 

its own purely spiritual DM 

alities, inspire the 1 ei 

Government, nothing whatever bi 

fair and free field for their I >n this 

condition alone, can a church be cntir- 
free from the last tincture ^i tin- 



// 



and so guaranteed, by her own character and 
principles, against that deplorable conflict with 
the Temporal Power which, more than any thing 
else, save only the closely allied tendency to 
the absorption of material wealth, certainly far 
more even than the merely theoretical under- 
mining of Her dogma, put the noble and vene- 
rable Catholic Church, unhappily, into irrevocable 
conflict with Modern Opinion. 

But the failure of the grand and glorious 
enterprize of the mediaeval Church, which at 
one time seemed so very near to the definitive 
solution of the supreme problem of the Human 
Unity, was by no means due exclusively to 
the faults and defects of that eternally venerable 
Church , whom all true Positivists sincerely 
revere and love, in the midst of all Her sad 
decay. The persistence of the Catholic Church 
even to this day, in spite of the so profound 
discredit cast upon her dogma, is, on the con- 
trary, a decisive proof of the impossibility of 
either setting aside the problem unsolved, leaving 
it to rest for ever in its actual state, without 
any solution at all, and an equally decisive proof 
of the impossibility of finding any other solution 
than the reorganization of a purely spiritual 



power, on a basis fairly irrefragable, and ca- 
pable, therefore, of universal extension , thus 
rendering finally possible, and therefore defini- 
tively assuring, the complete separation and 
profound mutual independence of the two pow- 
ers. But Feudalism, although it had spontaneously 
transformed military activity from conquering 
to defensive, was still an essentially military 
social State, and no essentially military 
is compatible with a radical separation between 

the tWO powers. No Ku' sed 

upon militarism is willing, it he can help it, to 

tolerate the exist an independent chur< 

A Priest who may invite him to moralize his 

own action, supremely as ti 
society may need such moralization, will ne< 
sarily be distasteful to him. All military action 
tends so profoundly to develope t' e ot 

arbitrary power in the chiefs, and to habiti; 
the people themselves to it hat no 

military Government will ever be willing, or 
even able, to tolerate a Church that is not. 
one means or another, in more or 
slavery to itself. The frank and 
nition of the principle of the separation of 
two powers, and the definitive abandonment of 



— 79 — 

the barbarous system of militarism (system 
certainly barbarous relatively to our modern 
occidental civilization, in which its action is 
necessarily at one and the same time retrograde 
and revolutionary), must needs be so essentially 
simultaneous as to be virtually a one act. For 
the whole system of militarism is in such utter 
antagonism to all the best and noblest tenden- 
cies of the modern spirit, as well as to the 
whole of the spirit and tendencies of Christianity, 
that it could not possibly subsist a fortnight, in 
the presence of a real freedom of discussion. 
The cause of civil and religious liberty, and 
that of the separation and mutual independence 
of the two powers, are in fact absolutely iden- 
tical. It is ignorance of this fact, or what is the 
same thing of the true meaning of the word 
^liberty", that is one of the greatest dangers, 
perhaps the chief danger, to European peace at 
this day, and the incessant irritant of our revo- 
lutionary state. For the true Human Liberty is 
not the liberty of tigers and gorillas, the ab- 
sence of all rule, of all systematic regulation. 
The very contrary, indeed. The true Human 
Liberty never exists till it is systematically in- 
stituted. "What exists spontaneously is quite 



another thing, any thing indeed but this. Genuine, 
real liberty is certainly not merely the al 
of a dominating Power which, simply bi 
it is power, that is I orce, b< 

therefore it can imp* elf, pretends 

>reme judge o\ every thii 
thing ; what is true and what 

right and what is wr what people 

may say or write Or print, and what they D 

not Bay or write or print, that pretends, or 

least that would lain pretend, tO what 

people shall think and what the I think. 

Were the question put in i 
any one of the 6 it peopl 

our modern \\ the properly 

European en inly pro 

to be the practically unanimous convi< I 
that people , that such a raiment would 

constitute the complete negat the n 

elementary Freedom , m universally 

recognized at this d and 

That, however, which 

ual revolutionary and 

its danger, is, that it I und< 

and 
stood, that the m 



by violence, of such a Government even as that 
just indicated, would of itself do little or nothing 
to insure a real Liberty. For it is a positivist 
maxim — and that is the same as to say a 
demonstrable and rationally undeniable principle 
— that no Society exists without Government. But 
as, on the other hand, no Government can exist 
without a sufficient foundation in public opinion, 
where there is a state of opinion such as to permit of 
the existence of a radically despotic government, 
systematic negation of all rational liberty, of all 
true human dignity, where for instance the people 
prefer not to have the trouble and responsibility 
of thinking for themselves, the only real remedy 
is in the modification of opinion, and the awak- 
ening of the public conscience to a more dig- 
nified attitude. Where there exists a sufficiently 
free discussion, such modifications of opinion as 
are really necessary naturally come about, if 
not quite spontaneously, at least so gradually 
as not to involve the smallest shock, and more- 
over without any injustice towards vested in- 
terests, even those that depend on the abuses 
to be modified. But where there is no provision 
for the peaceful and orderly and therefore free 
development of opinion, the really inevitable 



— 82 — 

modifications must needs come about with more 
or less suddenness, the efforts to prevent them 
tending in fact, and at last tendin >lv, 

to produce a violent explosion. It is certainly 
not an energetic Tempo torship thai 

necessarily dangerous either to 1 i 1 > « 
or to progress, die ( 
true type, accord 

Modern Polity, abundantly p «*r- 

g-etic dictatorship, in the hand illy 

and intellectually eminent i tble 

profoundly 
two powers, that 

freedom <>t d if not 

solutely identical i irily impl] 

other), would be, in the i lern 

spiritual anarchy, in md 

the most pr nment, the m 

really Favorable to the true Human I 
well as the best guarantee of 
But there is no reliable 
( >rder, where there is w 

tor rational liberty, an OUnd r- 

Human Dignity, both implied in and both a 
tely demanding the sysfeemati 
the principle of the separat tual 



- 83 - 

power from the temporal power. Anarchical 

Doctrines are inherently suicidal, alike in the 

political sphere and in the moral sphere, never 

so absolutely certain to break down, however 

contradictory the expression may seem to be, 

as just when the} 7 are to all appearance in the 

very act of succeeding triumphantly. Where, 

moreover, that complete negation of all rational, 

all properly Human Liberty and Human Dignity, 

the concentration of the two powers in the 

hands of the temporal government, actually 

exists, and with the real concurrence of the 

people, the situation will not be mended in the 

least by the infusion of no matter how large 

a dose of Democratic Institutions. So far as true 

liberty and human dignity are concerned, it 

would not mend the matter, nay, it would make 

it worse, for the usurping temporal government 

to be based entirely on democratic institutions. 

For practically that would necessarily mean 

simply the unlimited and totally irresponsible 

sway of the Plutocracy. 

True Liberty, the veritably Human Liberty, 

requires, in fact/ to sum up in few words this most 

indispensable theory, basis of all genuine Social 

Order and still more of all profound and dignified 

6* 



_ 84 - 

Moral Order, the free action of a government 
in harmony with the social situation, whose 
power is correlative to the social function it 
fulfils. A practical power corresponding to, 
and efficiently directing, the real and actual 
practical activity; a theoretical authority in 
harmony with the real beliefs of t' pie, 

capable therefore of devel in the public 

mind and heart, a high and < her moral 

ideal, rendering impossible tl dal, 

repeated more than Once durr 

centuries, of up on th< .1 sum: 

an unutterable moral b; 
the same time all the noblest human aspir 
indeed all that is really virt pat- 

riotic and honest in the 
not merely as dan. 
meriting tortures and death. to wit 
spectacle we ^\^ not, unhappily, have I 

even to the days of the Christian Q 

the times of the Caligulas and t 
The spiritual power nui clu- 

sively by means really appropr 
opment of solid intellectual i 
the highest moral sentiments, rhe smallest li 
inable employment of brut< 



- 85 - 

of Religion, and especially by or on behalf of 
the Priesthood itself, is even more fatal to moral- 
ity and social order, to human dignity and 
therefore to all real human virtue ; than the 
usurpation of spiritual functions by the tem- 
poral government.*) 

*) There is yet another explanation indispensable at this 
point, in order to the complete appreciation of this grand 
principle of the separation of the two powers, the systematic 
development of which is incomparably the greatest service ever 
rendered to mankind by Positive Science. While the normal 
spiritual power expounds sociological science, the grand general 
principles underlying the social existence and the spontaneous 
progress of our race, and therefore indicates the lines of 
direction which a wise statesmanship must needs follow, 
furnishing that statesmanship with the abstract principles 
so to speak of its art, it does not in the least degree 
pretend to indicate the immediate measures appropriate to 
any particular situation. It recognizes the exclusive competency 
of the practical statesman in regard to all questions of practical 
application in the political sphere proper, even of the principles 
which sociological science has ever so fully demonstrated. The 
supremely dominant question in practical politics is always 
that of opportunity, and on that it does not pretend to have 
any competency at all. According to the scientific synthesis 
all questions of practical politics are in the exclusive com- 
petence, as also the exclusive responsibility, of the practical 
statesman; so that if this statesman decides that, in the country 
the political direction of which is in his hands, the time has 
not come for permitting the public exposition of the scientific 
synthesis, the competent positivist theorician will certainly not 
breathe the faintest whisper of protest. Even on points decided 
by the practical statesman in direct opposition to counsels he 
has offered in the name of science, the positivist theorician 



— 86 — 

But the Middle Ages prepared for the nor- 
mal state of man upon the earth still more deci- 
sively yet by the admirable moral culture which 
the Catholic Church actually did institute, moral 
culture, however, essentially impossible without 
the separation of the two powers and the suf- 



will be the first to let tbe >n to 

tin- practical authority 
the wisdom or anwisdom »>t the 

Judgment th<- positivist theorician would be very ill-advised in- 
deed to n ish to forestaL I 
i ontrary, on which the fnl 
\>\k\ alence <»i the I 
It is just bu< li judgments thai 1 
thesi 

I' oi the bch iological theorician 
of practical politics would 
to undertake, on the 

to set asid< the ezpei tain and ship 

himself. A statesman who rejected tl the 

bcm nee oi th« poj 
experiem iptain who. in th 

Bcience, declined the nse of tin 
and celestial maps, and mply to 1 

acquired skilL I lu- hen kin \\ onld 

to one o\ coming safely into port, while the presutnptn 
Astronomer would certain!] 

from shipwreck only by --till m ptly roundering in the 

open 

Meantime the difficulties that beset the 
in the fulfilment o\ his so indh this 

day so great, and tantly in< that it is the in- 

variable duty of every well-instructed mind. I 



- 8 7 - 

ficient independence of the spiritual power. In 
spite of a dogma altogether unsuited to the end, 
giving rise to obstacles and hindrances of all 
sorts, the Catholic Priesthood, with an admirable 
empirical wisdom, developed especially in the 
various Religious Orders, that arose from time 

in its power to diminish, never any thing to add to them. The 
accomplishment of the spontaneous progress is, in reality, so 
much better assured than are the supremely fundamental needs of 
Order, in the actual situation of to-day, that the wise policy is 
that which seeks before all things stability, and would fain make 
the inevitable modifications as gradual as possible, avoiding simply 
the blind resistance which renders violent explosion inevitable. 
And as to the positivist propagande, it ought to be introduced 
and encouraged only there where it will tend, and so far as it 
will tend, to the pacification of the public mind, in a word 
to the maintenance of tranquillity, object of supreme importance 
to-day, or on the other hand, to pave the way for modifications 
foreseen to be finally inevitable, and so, in both cases alike, to 
lighten the task of the Temporal Ruler. For the Governing 
Classes themselves, however, a knowledge of sociological science 
may have an importance of the gravest character even forth- 
with. It is, however, only among the central population of the 
Occident, whose Initiative in the grand movement of the Pro- 
gress of Civilization nothing can annul, initiative at this day 
indeed more manifest than at any former period, that the Posi- 
tivist Propagande (save only so far as the religious side of it 
is concerned, as the satisfaction of a purely personal moral 
need among a very limited class, and as a calming, pacifying 
influence among a class very much wider) is not only fully 
opportune, but of urgent necessity, even among the whole mass 
of the people, in the great cities especially. It must be manifest 
to every well-informed mind that, however urgently important 



— 88 — 

to time to accomplish reforms rendered indis- 
pensable by the incurable vices of the dogma, 
effected a culture and development of the nobler 
sentiments of our common human nature, that 
challenges still the enthusiastic admiration of 
every soul in any wise capable of appreciating 
them. This moral culture, greatly aided by the 
noble institution of Chivalry, and its so charac- 
teristic worship of the Virgin Mother, was time 
and again defeated, relatively to the clergy itself 
especially, by the theocratic aspirations and 
corrupting temporal ambitions engendered by 
the dogma in the chiefs of the secular priest- 
hood, but' most of all by that inexhaustible 
source of corruption and demoralization for any 
clergy, its material wealth, the development of 
which the strikingly severe denunciations of 
the Christian scriptures could not prevent, but 
which suffices, even alone, to render utterly 
inevitable the decay and moral paralysis into 
which this grand and venerable Catholic Church 
has fallen at this day. Nothing can efficiently 

for the peace, good order and prosperity of all Europe, may 
be the Inauguration of the Positive Worship of Humanity, that 
Worship ran by no possibility be inaugurated any where 
outside of the City of Paris, irrevocably the universal Metro- 
polis of Humanity. 



protect any Priesthood whatever from this 
utterly fatal source of decay, (far more practically 
decisive even than the theoretical undermining 
of the dogma), except the systematic prevalence 
of the principle of the separation of the two 
powers, which, pushed to its just and logical 
ultimate result, effectually debars the priesthood 
from the possession of any material wealth what- 
soever, even from the legal ownership of its 
own Temples and Schools and its own sacerdotal 
residences. 

The double fact on which, according to Po- 
sitive Science all religious Culture really de- 
pends, is, first, the general biological law that 
all living organs develope by exercise while they 
tend towards atrophy by inaction; and secondly 
that the expression of benevolent sentiments and 
of the disinterested sympathies constitutes just 
such an exercise, and one that is constantly op- 
tional. That any such basis for religious exer- 
cises was inconceivable, and so remains moreover, 
under a theological dogma, does not alter the 
fact, nor render any the less real the admirable 
results obtained by religious exercises in the 
long past, although instituted under the fostering' 
guidance of theological ideas, then so natural to 



— 90 — 

man, results in fact due to the above biological 
natural law. Nothing is to-day more important 
than that the modern mind, however bent it 
may be upon emancipating itself from theo- 
logical beliefs, should learn to appreciate the 
magnificent results attained by the Middle Ages 
in this sphere of moral culture, and cease to 
confound the moral culture itself with the fables 
upon which it was in the past dogmatically 
based, and then inevitably so. Our supreme 
need is to get back, at all events, the moral 
culture, however different may be the dogmatic 
foundation on which in the future it will have 
to repose. The very foundation of a rational 
appreciation of the actual social situation, con- 
sists in a more just view than commonly prevails 
of this so decisive period, the Middle Ag 
resplendent as it is with moral and religious 
glory. For thus only can be restored that his- 
toric sentiment without which all real social 
Order, and at least equally all real social Pro- 
gress, are eternally impossible. There can in 
fact be no reliable progress until the conception 
of Progress is systematically linked with that 
of Order. That again can result only from the 
demonstration of the Present as the natural 



— 91 — 

product of the Past, the anti-historic spirit of 
recent centuries being the negation of the 
very progress about which so many empty 
boasts are being made and so much un- 
mitigated cant uttered. For the only Future 
really possible is that which results from the 
prolongation of the same lines of development 
as are revealed by the Past of onr Race, re- 
garded as leading up naturally to the Present; 
while the competent study of that Past, from 
this point of view, necessarily results in a veri- 
table demonstration of the Human Future upon 
the Earth, and so puts a decisive end to all 
sorts of disordered dreams, while giving fullest 
satisfaction to all sane aspirations. 

To fully appreciate, however, the sublime 
phenomena presented to us by this truly heroic 
period of religion and morality, we must atten- 
tively consider the practical result that had in- 
variably followed from the confusion of the two 
powers under the ancient Theocracies, confusion 
then no doubt inevitable, neither the theological 
dogma, nor a purely military temporal govern- 
ment, being consistent with their real and sin- 
cere separation and necessary mutual inde- 
pendence. 



— 92 — 

The Theocracies ; even the pure theocracies 
under the Conservative Polytheism ; always tended 
finally to the subordination of the priesthood to 
the military caste. We see the same again 
under the Mosaic or monotheistic Theocracy. 
To punish His own chosen people for their re- 
peated rebellion against Him, God gave them 
a King: that was, naturally enough, the way 
in which the Hebrew Theocracy recorded its 
own defeat. According to the theological con- 
ception King and priest was each alike the 
representative of the supreme God or Gods : 
while moreover the very Ideal of the theological 
theory is the unlimited sway of personal caprice. 
Under the scientific conception , Righteousness 
is regarded as necessarily in accordance with 
the Will of God because it is Righteousness: 
under the theological conception, Righteousnc 
and sometimes also the most revolting Unright- 
eousness, have to be regarded as Righteousness 
because they are declared to be in accordance 
with the will of God, an accordance, however, 
utterly indemonstrable. And so when, finally, 
the ideal moral perfection, the Infinite Goodm 
became the supreme attribute of the Deity, and 
the fear of God, which was. according to the 



— 93 — 

ancient Prophet the beginning of wisdom, be 
gan to transform itself into a filial love destined 
to cast out the fear, the anthropomorphic modi- 
fication was so decisive as already to presage 
the advent of the one definitive conception of 
Humanity. But the Warrior was a so much better 
representative of the unlimited sway of purely 
personal caprice than the Priest, who was al- 
ways seeking, as for as the existing conditions 
of positive knowledge would permit, for an Ideal 
Perfection, that the King always finally won, 
in spite of all the efforts of systematic Wisdom, 
his supremacy over the Pontiff. It was under 
Catholicism only, that the Normal Order could 
give a first distinct intimation of its fundamental 
characteristic. The complete confusion of the 
two powers, which is the very ideal of Monarchy 
in the sociological sense of this term, had always 
brought about so intense a concentration of 
AVealth and Power that a profound corruption 
was generated in he very heart of the sockil 
body, corruption which necessarily resulted, as 
all moral corruption must do when sufficiently 
developed, in social death. In this abyss, inevi- 
table under such conditions, perished one after 
another of the ancient Theocracies, Egyptian, 



- 94 — 

Assyrian, Babylonian, and we know not how 
many more still earlier which have left not even 
a name behind them. It was only the Moslem 
regeneration which preserved the Hindoo civil- 
ization from total disruption. While in our 
modern Occidental Civilization, since the decisive 
triumph of the system of temporal omnipotence, 
relatively to our modern post-christian civilization 
so profoundly revolutionary, it is the resurrection 
of the Sardanapalian Ideal, of the Getting the 
Having and the Enjoying, which, in so profound 
harmony with the spontaneously predominant 
energy of our egotist and animal instincts, is at 
bottom the supreme danger now menacing our 
very existence. For in reality Human Society 
is based upon the gradually developing predom- 
inance of the social sympathies over the egotist 
and animal instincts. The vital Principle of 
society is Love: and the notable scheme of our 
modern „Liberalism u — which word is only a 
euphonic veil for an enervating and desolating 
Individualism — scheme for dispensing with 
this vital principle of all Religion and of all 
really human Moral Existence, andtherefore of all 
Society in any wise capable of endurance, and sub- 
stituting in its place an ingeniously contrived pon- 



— 95 — 

deration of material interests, is doomed to a 
radical and richly deserved failure. The sooner 
this fact is distinctly apprehended and fully 
understood the better for us all, and especially 
for those on whom the social and political 
responsibility rests, for our governing classes. 
No doubt the Church, both in its ancient trunk 
and in its modern offshoots, does perfectly un- 
derstand it already. But with its hands and feet 
in irons, what can it do? It is to knock off 
those fetters and those manacles (including the 
self-imposed — perhaps especially these) that 
is the supremely important aim to-day, one 
that, with a little serious and unprejudiced 
meditation, must necessarily command the ener- 
getic concurrence of every really thoughtful 
mind; aim to which at all events all the Posi- 
tivist Religious Propagande ought to be system- 
atically subordinated. 

The institution of a morality independent 
of and superior to mere legality, which, pre- 
saged as in fact it had been many centuries 
earlier, was the fundamental characteristic of 
Christianity, and the practical development of 
which, and in a manner supremely admirable, 
was the greatest service of all accomplished on 



- 96 - 

behalf of our Race by the mediaeval civilization 
rendered possible a most energetic reaction 
against this ever -besetting , but worse than 
bestial Sardanapalian Ideal: the brutes fulfil their 
destiny, but man, in persisting in a career of 
sensuality and selfishness, tramples his into the 
mire and mud. The fundamental constitution of 
our individual nature, however, renders this 
ideal, worse than bestial though it be, our eter- 
nally besetting danger; for if the egotist and 
animal instincts had not a very decisive predom 
imince of spontaneous energy over the social 
sympathies, there would be wanting, especially 
in the absence of any systematic conception of 
our real nature and destiny, the indispensable 
guarantee for the conservation of our personal 
existence; without which conservation neverthe- 
less, society itself must come to an end Bat without 
a powerful reaction against the spontaneously 
dominant egotism, society equally perishes, 
although from an opposite tendency, that to- 
wards sensual corruption. It was just this ele- 
ment in the teachings of the Xazarenes, that 
commended this sect to the great St. Paul, 
when he spontaneously felt the need of some 
new regenerative influence in the Greco-Roman 



— 97 — 

World, to counteract the degrading moral ten- 
dencies of the Greek civilization, and at the 
same time saw plainly, that a monotheistic basis 
was indispensable for any influence that could 
then be sufficiently energ'etic. In the teachings 
of Jesus, the hostility to material accumulations 
was radical and absolute : the rich man was, as 
such, profoundly at enmity with God; he must 
part with all his individual wealth, and bring 
every thing into the common treasury of the 
family of the saints, as the fundamental con- 
dition of his admission into the Kingdom of 
God, which was to be forthwith established upon 
the Earth The radically communist character of 
the Gospels, and the other Christian sacred 
Books, abundantly justified the wise precaution 
of the Catholic Church, in withholding them from 
the undirected study and comments of the laity. 
Not because there would be any danger of the 
Communist Ideal's having any widespread prac- 
tical prevalence. The system of a common 
ownership of all material possessions, beyond 
articles of strictly personal use, served an ines- 
timable purpose, an end of incalculably high 
social value, in the case of the monastic insti- 
tutions, during the development of the Feudo- 



Catholic civilization, however intolerable the abus- 
es those institutions may have afterwards devel- 
oped; and even now, within certain limited spheres 
of the kind, that system may not be without its 
use. But that system is conciliable only with a 
very pristine stage of social development; as 
the basis of the common social life. A people 
subjected to a crushing despotism, which utterly 
debars them from participation in any larger 
social life, may find in such a system a certain 
material defence, and even a narrowly limited 
play for the social sentiments. Rut, save in some 
such conditions, it is utterly inadmissible. Radi- 
cally inconsistent with every kind of progress, 
because radically irreconcileable with any kind 
of freedom, it deprives life of all stimulus, and 
tends towards an utterly unendurable ennui. All 
attempts to artificially institute such a system, 
made under a regime of social and political 
liberty that gives free play to such experiments, 
utterly break down after a very short ex- 
perience. The same system imposed by tor 
as it could be only by a political surprise, would 
quite certainly come to the same end, only more 
speedily, making the experiment, as an experi- 
ment, worthless. No doubt the actual state of 



— 99 — 

our modern European or Western Civilization, 
does expose us to this, and all sorts of other 
surprises. But that which was at stake in the 
early days of Christianity, was the moral culture 
capable of being evoked from the Xazarene 
teaching, and all the rest of that admirable 
Feudo-catholic civilization we are this day con- 
templating. 

This Catholic moral culture, however, was 
also in its turn directed — as indeed all moral- 
ities, properly so-called, all above the most 
elementary (or rather the merely spontaneous, 
due simply to the bare fact of social existence), 
have necessarily had to be — against the same 
danger, essentially consisting, in fact, in the un- 
checked domination in our individual life of the 
nutritive instinct and the sexual instinct, the two 
lowest of our egotist and animal instincts, and 
therefore by far the most energetic. These two, 
among the seven impulsions which constitute 
the lower side of our individual nature, are 
spontaneously so much the most energetic, that 
the whole question of the moral regeneration 
and purification of that nature, and therefore of 
the development of the normal social harmony, 
depends on the surmounting of the immense 

7* 



100 



spontaneoUvS predominance of these two closely al- 
lied, although often practically divergent, instincts. 
The triumphant success of the mediaeval church, 
in both regards, was something unspeakably 
admirable, especially in view of the utter want 
of adaptation in the dogma to the end that 
needed attainment, and that w T as in fact to so 
eminent a degree attained. There is no shadow 
of ground for imagining the mediaeval moral 
culture destined to any ultimate failure, or for 
supposing any such failure in any wise possible, 
had it been instituted on the dogmatic basis of 
conceptions capable of retaining their hold upon 
men's beliefs. In relation to both these instincts, 
on the contrary, the successes attained were 
most decisive, and indeed glorious. 

What phenomena have ever been developed 
in human society, that can surpass in sublimity 
those obtained by the Catholic Church, in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in repression 
of the nutritive instinct? All the circumstan* 
and social conditions favored the worst abu> 
Manners were rough and uncultured, unless in 
the returning Crusaders, already corrupted, and 
with faith broken down. And vet we see the 
Clarisses and the third Order of St. Franc 



drawing into their ranks the sons and daughters 
of monarchs and reigning dukes, and developing 
far and wide, among the great and the mighty 
and the wealthy, a veritable passion for poverty. 
And in regard to the sexual instinct, the triumph 
was even more decisive still, as being still more 
difficult to obtain. It was among the great and 
and the mighty, also, that were developed those 
very remarkable chaste marriages, that might 
have grown, with due systematic encouragement, 
into a grand and permanent institution, with in- 
calculably beneficent results, under the unspeak- 
ably admirable Worship of the Virgin Mother, 
so greatly fostered by, and so immensely aiding 
to develope and to ennoble, the Institution of 
Chivalry. Of course the specific practical results 
were marred by the absolute spirit of theologism, 
which at every point tends to defeat the moral 
culture, first poisoning its very foundation prin- 
ciple and then perverting its practical reactions.*) 

*) The incurable tendency of Theological Dogma, becoming 
only intensified in this its period of decay, to betray and finally 
sacrifice the Religion built up on its foundation, is remarkably 
manifested, both as to kind and degree, among the Protestant 
Sects. The so-called Reformation brought about, no doubt, a 
certain recrudescence of theologism, ultimating now-a-days in 
some curious phenomena, especially in the development of 
a fetichistic worship of the Bible, which, as so much paper, 



— 102 — 

But the immense success of the Culture as 
such remains beyond all possible challenge or 
doubt ; eternal source of highest hopes for 
the Human Future. The moral culture is, in 
reality, simply a natural development, although 
needing to be made systematic; development 

printed in a certain fashion, and in a peculiar style of calf- 
binding, constitutes, especially in the United States of America, 
a sort of Idol, whose worship is not one whit more elevating 
than that of the metallic Idols furnished by the Christian 
manufacturers of the English Town <>t Birmingham, and the 
Christian merchants o\~ English seaports, to our fellow men in 
the more backward stages o\ social development, furnished, 
too, along with whiskey and other worse and more deadly 
poisons that cannot even be named, (some Bibles being of course 
thrown in), at the cannon's mouth, in the name of B Progi 
and „ Civilization**. Bnt as to the contents o( the same Bible, 
in the more and more rare cases in which it is actually read, it> 
communistic and other moral tendencies are completely neutral- 
ized by a process oi' pretended spiritualization, the honest 
name of which is simply mystification, and which pro< 
really, to use the biblical phraseology, ..make the word of God 
of none effect by the traditions' 1 of the theologians. This mode 
also of utterly sacrificing Christian Religion to a professedly 
Christian Dogma, needs also to be brought to a complete and 
immediate end, if our modern society is not to perish incon- 
tinently in a slough oi unfathomable corruption, which X 
paper exposures and parliamentary or other Commissions 
Inquiry can do nothing to cure, but may easily make worse. In- 
putting the .Public Conscience on a wrong scent, especially in 
leading it to trust to legal remedies, necessarily altogether 
illusory, and so diverting it from the only real remedy, the in- 
dispensably necessary rejuvenation of Religion. 



— 103 — 

of the higher side of our nature relatively to 
the lower — development of the noble spirit 
of self-sacrifice, spirit which still furnishes 
triumphant manifestations, most unmistakeable, 
of the fact that it cannot die out from among 
men ; whatever may become of the theological 
beliefs with which the culture of that spirit was 
formerly linked. The question is being forced, 
now, upon the attention of the thoughtful and 
conscientious, within quite as much as without 
the pale of the Christian Churches , Catholic 
and Protestant, whether it be really the fact 
that theological beliefs have become, at last, 
directly hostile to the development of this truly 
divine spirit, which six centuries ago was so 
admirably developed under their banner. It de- 
pends upon the attitude which the Heads and 
Leaders of the Christian Churches henceforth 
take, under the so entirely altered relations 
between Science and Religion, what answer the 
really thoughtful, conscientious and sincere will 
finally have to make to this question. 

In order to direct the actual conduct' under 
the impulsion of this noble and truly divine 
spirit, positive science, Sociological Science, is 
no doubt necessary; it alone indicates with 



— 104 — 

sufficient exactitude the normal state of man 
upon the Earth, objective aim of all wise devo- 
tedness. Still more is sociological science ex- 
clusively competent to indicate the means by 
which ends, ever so universally desired and longed 
for by a highly developed moral sense and 
genuine Christian sentiment, can be securely and 
peacefully attained, without shock, material or 
moral, and without economical derangement. 
But it is only the atheistic Specialist Science 
and the pure Quackeries that under the specialist 
regime can so easily impose themselves on the 
modern mind, committing fearful ravages — the 
^Modern Science" in whose adulterous embra- 
the Church is forced, in Her actual alliance with 
the State, to live, to the ruin of Her own moral 
energy and Her efficacy on behalf of social order, 
— that has ever dared, in its sacrilegious irrup- 
tions into this sacred sphere, topropound theories, 
like those of the Political Economists for in- 
stance, in open defiance of the most fundamental 
principles of Christian Morality., But so magical 
and irresistible a power is wielded at this day 
by Positive Science, that a pure quackery, that 
has nothing* of science about it but its bare 
name, and that an impudent usurpation, was 



— 105 — 

able, for a whole generation and more, to strike 
dumb the Christian Churches by the mere terror 
of its usurped name, no one daring to utter a 
whisper of protest against its rank and blas- 
phemous atheisms. The Scientific Synthesis, on 
the contrary, is in so profound harmony with 
all the Christian Ideal, that there are but few 
elements indeed in the Positive Regime, or sys- 
tem of practical life logically resulting from the 
sociological theories, which might not, with the 
utmost consistency, and with scarcely more than 
a shadow of modification, be adopted by any 
Christian Church, and enforced by the precepts 
of its own dogma upon its disciples and ad- 
herents. Nay, one cannot be really faithful to 
the Gospel Teachings, really faithful to the 
glorious traditions of the Mediaeval Church, 
without thus more or less appropriating the 
positive regime. Certainly no enlightened 
Christian would, in this nineteenth century, dis- 
sipate the material treasures entrusted by the 
Divine Providence (or by Humanity) to his 
keeping and administration, (the essential fact 
remains, unchanged by differences in our human 
phraseology), treasures Avhose social efficacy 
demands at once a high degree of concentration 



— io6 — 

and a strictly individual appropriation, either on 
his own frivolous amusement, to say nothing of 
sensual indulgences which to the true Christian, as 
much as to the religious Positivist, are a scorn and 
an abomination, nor on the other hand in an unwise 
improvident, and insulting so-called charitv, that 
every one knows now to have no other result, 
than the still further impoverishment and moral 
degradation of the poor. The intelligent Christian, 
at the end of this nineteenth century, in recog- 
nizing himself as simply the steward of his Lord 
and Saviour in respect to his material wealth, 
just as much as the Positivist in recognizing him- 
self directly and frankly as the steward of Hu- 
manity, will so administer his wealth as to tend, 
in the highest degree, to Social and Moral 
Order and Harmony, and thus indirectly to the 
highest well-being of the whole Human Race. 
Nor certainly would that same intelligent Chris- 
tian, if perchance he could come to appreciate 
the unspeakable blessedness, and profoundly 
ennobling reactions, of the habit of permanent 
and systematic chastity in the conjugal relation, 
(or what is the same thing, to understand the in- 
evitably and profoundly degrading tendency of 
all sexual indulgence for its own sake) — suffer 



that wise and intelligent appreciation to deprive 
domestic life of its chief ornament, its highest 
joy, and its supreme social end, in the rearing 
of a wisely restricted number of children, as- 
suring thus, at once the perpetuation and also 
the ever-upward development of our Human 
Race. It is, on the contrary, b) r a w T ise and 
efficient regulation of domestic life - - that sacred 
sphere into which the rude and profane hands 
of temporal authority can never penetrate 
without desecrating it — ■ that a renewed moral 
culture, finally, it may be hoped, to become even 
far more efficient, more lofty, more profoundly 
searching, than that of the eternally glorious 
Mediaeval Church, (at this day, save in very 
narrow and exceptional spheres, so deplorably 
forgotten and abandoned), will most effectually of 
all aid in terminating the actual social disorders, 
quench the revolutionary spirit, by diverting 
into other channels all that element of it which 
consists of really sane aspirations, (and without 
which element it would soon die out of itself), and 
so most efficiently of all prepare for that King- 
dom of God which the scientific synthesis desig- 
nates the Normal State of Man upon the Earth. 
This is the fundamental significance of the 



— 108 — 

retention, by the Positive Religion of Humanity, 
of the gracious and benign figure of the Virgin- 
Mother as an object of very special adoration. 
The last vestige of superstitious fable being 
dropped from this conception, as from the other 
sublime, eternal realities of Christianity, it re- 
mains purely a noble ideal, a chivalrous aspi- 
ration, an extreme, Utopian limit to a profoundly 
real, sublime, eternal progress, traceable down- 
wards to the very lowest animal and vegetable 
organism in the grand Universal Biological 
Hierarchy, progress, relatively to the human 
race, away from a worse than bestial carnality, 
up towards a perfectly pure and holy lo 
the only love truly and distinctively human, 
the only love that, among genuinely cultured 
souls, really deserves the name of love, the 
love that asks only to devote itself freely to its 
object, profoundly appreciating the truth, inac- 
cessible to the coarse, materialistic natures, that 
in periods of social decay become so numerous 
— that it is more blessed to love than to be loved. 
In the positivist religious propagande this con- 
ception naturally takes a prominent, indeed a 
supreme place, the gracious figure of the Virgin- 
Mother, with Her child in Her arms or at Her 



— 109 — 

knees, being recognized as the true visual Re- 
presentative of Humanity; but here, in these 
annual lectures, just as in the systematic Public 
Instruction instituted in the actual situation by 
the Positive School, all that is appropriate is 
simply to indicate the fact that positive moral 
science, the real, the genuine science which 
teaches the immutable natural laws of our in- 
dividual human nature, does in fact culminate 
in just this Ideal. But, for many and various 
reasons, too obvious to need explicit mention, 
it is clearly manifest that, in these purely scien- 
tific and philosophical Expositions, it would be 
quite out of place to expatiate upon a topic, 
so directly and almost exclusively appealing to 
the highest and noblest sentiments of the 
Human Heart. 

III. 

But the definitive advent of a systematically 
peaceful social activity in the temporal sphere, 
and in the spiritual of a complete system of 
conceptions all purely demonstrable, rendering 
for the first time fully possible a truly Universal 
Religion, and rendering therefore its appearance 
among us sooner or later fully certain, and with 



— no — 



a universal religion, a fully planetary priest- 
hood, is the grand phenomenon presented bv 
the last six centuries, side by side with the sad 
spectacle of the long, painful, more and more 
disorderly decay of the mediaeval system. It is 
this double movement of decomposition and of 
recomposition, which we shall have to study to- 
gether next year. If, in fact, circumstances permit 
of our meeting together again, on the next 
recurrence of this anniversary, we shall have 
to review the services rendered by Augnste 
Comte in the elucidation of that grand, and yet 
in many respects gloomy. Historic Period, the 
Development of Modern Society, stretching from 
the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the 
eighteenth centuries. Then the year following, 
if nothing occur to render the continuation of 
these Annual Lectures impossible or undesirable, 
we shall study the Theory developed by the 
same unexampled Thinker in regard to the Great 
Modern Crisis, which, rendered inevitable by the 
immense difficulty of the double transition that 
then had to be effected, broke out in France in 
1789, and, in spite of the peculiar circumstan> 
which there imparted to it a special intensity, 
making it seem for the moment to be a phenom- 



— Til — 

enon exclusive^ French, soon made manifest 
its essential character, as common in its funda- 
mental conditions to all the five Great Peoples 
included in our Modern Occidental Civilization. 
This difficult transition, as long as it remains 
merely spontaneous, as indeed it must needs do 
until it be fairly understood, necessarily keeps 
our Modern Society in a state of revolutionary 
fermentation only too full of danger, a state 
that will entirely cease, as soon as the transition 
can be transformed from spontaneous to system- 
atic, by the advent of a sufficient knowledge 
of the transition that will, in. any case, have to 
get itself effectuated. 

Nothing is more important for the peace 
and good order of Society, than that the changes, 
which become, in fact, inevitable, should not be 
left to be brought about by revolutionary struggles 
from below, but should, on the contrary, be ac- 
complished in a calm, peaceful, gradual and or- 
derly manner from above, by the action of the 
enlightened Statesman. If only Louis XVI had 
stood faithfully by his Heaven-sent Minister, 
the great and wise Turgot, the violent struggles 
of 1789 had been unnecessary , and therefore 
could never have happened. And it was his 



— 112 — 

own better self, too ; to which the unhappy 
Louis was unfaithful, as well as to his immortal 
Minister, when, in an ill-fated hour in the year 
1776, he consented to the fatal dismissal, that 
was fraught with so unhappy consequences for 
the whole of our modern Europe. But the blind 
struggle with the nascent new order of thing 
into which Louis XVI was enticed, even after 
178;), struggle that cost him and so many others 
their lives, is a striking proof of Hie danger of 
leaving the inevitable modifications to be tor. 
on society from below. Lor when the natural 
Leaders of Society themselves undertake the 
accomplishment of these modifications, that 
accomplishment in no wise necessitates any ab- 
rupt or perturbating changes in the personnel 
of Government, or any dangerous interference 
with existing interests. The inevitable transfor- 
mation consists essentially only in this very 
simple fact, that there is a new kind of activity 
that, by the aid of new methods, needs direction ; 
if violent changes occur in the personnel of the 
Governing Classes, it is simply because th< 
older classes are unable or unwilling to under- 
take the new Functions. But the violence and 
painfulness of all the modifications really ne< 



— H3 — 

sary, may be entirely saved, where the nature 
of the inevitable transition is sufficiently known 
to permit the accomplishment of the transition 
to be effected under the practical direction of 
the natural chiefs of the body politic, through the 
instrumentality of an accomplished Statesman 
enlightened by Positive Science. If there be any 
difficulty at all in the matter, it can only arise 
from the fact that Turgots and Leon Gambettas 
are not to be had for the mere asking. It remains 
to be seen w r hether they can be developed. 
They certainly cannot be by any system of 
education that altogether excludes investigation 
of the phenomena that have to be dealt with. 
Three years from to-day, which will be the 
hundredth year of this great modern crisis, we 
shall have, supposing* circumstances still to per- 
mit the continuation of these Anniversary Lec- 
tures, to dwell on the brilliant picture of the 
Future State of Man upon the Earth, deduced 
by Auguste Comte, with strict scientific exac- 
titude, from the wise co-ordination of the several 
elements of that state spontaneously developed 
in the past. While in the three subsequent 
years, the work of Auguste Comte being then 
sufficiently known, at least in its most important 



-^ .1*4 — 

aspect ; we shall be free to direct our contem- 
plation more specifically to the person of this 
unexampled Renovator, and in three successive 
Lectures we will consider Auguste Comic tke 
Philosopher, Auguste Comte the Founder and 
Auguste Comte the Man. The entire Series, of 
Eight Lectures, will then comprize a complete 
and authentic account, only from a popular 
rather than an academical point of view, of the 
Life and Work of the extraordinary man, who 
is but now beginning to be known, and who 
will be truly appreciated only centuries hence. 
For Auguste Comte accomplished Three distinct 
Theoretical Constructions, each one of which 
would have sufficed to win for him the Immortality 
of an Aristotle or of a Descartes. But all this 
vast labor sums itself up in the decisive and 
irrefragable demonstration of the continuous and 
irresistible supremacy of Moral Considerations 
in the ensemble of Human Existences. This' 
supremacy may be overlooked for a time, and 
indeed altogether ignored, and yet society not 
go all to pieces immediately. Happily it is pos- 
sible for society to live, for a considerable 
time, on its inherited moral capital. But, with 
that neglect of the supreme destinies of Human- 



— lis — 



ity the social decomposition begins, decompo- 
sition that nothing can arrest but a sincere re- 
pentance of the moral treason committed, repent- 
ance manifested, as sincere repentance always 
has to be, by an abandonment of the evil ways, 
and a frank and honest return to the normally 
supreme allegiance. 

Henry Edger 

Born 22 January 1820 at Chehvood Gate 
parish of Fletching, Sussex, England, since 
18 November 1 861 adoptive citizen of the United 
States of America: (declaration of intention filed 
23 April 185 1.) 

Presbourg (9 Conventgasse) Hungary 

24 Descartes 97 (31 October 1885.) 



A paraitre incessamment: 

Auguste Comte et le Moyenage : 

conference faite devant un cercle prive dans la Ville de 
Presbourg le samedi, 24 Guttemberg 97 (5 Septembre 1885.) 

Par HENRY EDGER, 

Citoyen adoptif (anglais de naissance) de l'Etat de New -York, Etats-Unis 
d'Amerique. 

En preparation pour la Presse: 

Indications simp/es et sommaires 

quant a la 

RELIGION POSITIVE DE L'HUMANITE. 

Par le mime Aidenr. 

A paraitre pins tard: 

I<a Pri^re Positive 

et les autres pratiques purement personelles de la 

Esligi@& ^®iitiT@ I@ XMmmmXk 

Par le meme Auteur. 
LA REVUE OCCIDENTALE 

organe de 

publi£e sous la direction de M. Pierre Laffitte, parait tous les 

deux mois. L'Abonnement par an, affranchissement compris, 

20 francs, se fait cbez M. Vaillant Administrateur de la Revue 

au Bureau, 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Paris. 



By the same Author preparing for the press: 

Simple and summary Indications 

relative to the 

Positive Religion of Humanity. 



By the same Author (to appear later) 

PRIVATE PRAYER 

and the other purely personal practices of the 
Positive Religion of Humanity. 



INTERNATIONAL POLICY. 

Essays 

By various Authors, on the 

Foreign Relations of England. 

The fundamental doctrine of modern Social Life 
is the subordination of politics to morals. 

„AUGUSTE COMTE-. 



Second Edition. 



London: Chapman and Hall Limited. 



Printed by Carl Angermayer, Presbourg, Hui 






§ " "- 



Auguste COMTE 



B 






: 



18 



—7^ 



AND 

j THE MIDDLE AGES j 

A LECTURE 

GIVEN BEFORE A PRIVATE CIRCLE 

IN THE 

CITY OF POZSONY 

(PRESBOURG) 

ON SATURDAY 24 GUTTEMBERG 97 

(5 SEPTEMBER 1885) 
BY 

HENRY EDGER, 

Naturalized Citizen (English-born) of the United States of America. 

Fais ce que dois advienne que pourra. 



POZSONY : 

PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHED 

BY ALL BOOKSELLERS. 

AGENT FOR THE UNITED STATES: Dr. P. J. POPOFF, 

1948 ATLANTIC AVENUE, BROOKLYN, NEW-YORK. 

-&.11 irig-lvts reserved. 



.....,,.. . . . — —; ■ • < ■_• - ■ • • ■ • • 

Price Sixty Kreuzer. — One .Shilling. — Thirty live cents. 



A paraitre incessamment : 

Auguste Comte et le Moyenage: 

conference faite devant un cercle prive dans la Ville de 
Presbourg le samedi, 24 Guttemberg 97 (5 Septembre 1885.) 

Par HENRY EDGER, 

Citoyen adoptif ( anglais de naissance) de l'Etat de New -York, Etats-Unis 
d'Amerique. 



En preparation pour la Presse: 

Indications simples et sommaires 

quant a la 

RELIGION POSITIVE DE L'HUMANITE. 

Par le meme Auteur. 
A paraitre plus tard: 

La Pri^re Positive 

et les autres pratiques purement personelles de la 

Par le meme Auteur. 



LA REVUE OCCIDENTALE 

organe de 



publiee sous la direction de M. Pierre Laffitte, parait tous les 

deux mois. L'Abonnement par an, affranchissement corapris, 

20 francs, se fait chez M. Vaillant Administrateur de la Revue 

au Bureau, 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Paris. 



3 j the im Author preparing for the press: 

Simple and summary Indications 

relative to the 

Positive Religion of Humanity. 

By the same Author (to appear later) 

PRIVATE PRAYER 

and the other purely personal practices of the 

Positive Religion of Humanity. 

INTERNATIONAL POLICY. 
Essays 

By various Autho the 

Foreign Relations ol England. 

The fundamental doctrine of modern Social Life 
is the subordination of politics to morals. 

„AUGUSTE COMTE-. 

London: Chapman and Hall Li 









■ * 


















LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



027 281 557 4 



I I 



JB'' "' 

■ 
■ 

■ 



I ■ 



s /x 



... I 



. i v* 









: , ■ 



, 1 1 X 



_ 



■ 

' 1 1 : ' ' 



